"... throwing spitballs ..."
The only honourable way to resolve this outrage is by peashooters at dawn.
As night turned into morning, events took a turn for the strange at the ITU conference, with a vote which wasn't a vote, a resolution which wasn't resolved and an indecent proposal from Russia wielded as a threat. The non-vote came as 2am approached, with the conference centre being held open while delegates continued …
"The ITU works entirely by consensus - which is why it has such a hard time achieving anything."
You mean that's why when it does things they are generally sensible?
If there is no consensus on what action should be taken, or on what that action should be, doing nothing makes more sense than enacting something under an entirely artificial and manufactured sense of urgency.
If they don't decide anything, what bad thing will happen? Nothing. So don't decide anything.
When you look at the sort of "achievements" many bodies have - our governments for example - it makes you long for gridlock.
And they seem to manage consensus beyond the ITU too. H.264, for example, is ISO/IEC 14496-1 (MPEG-4 Part 10). JPEG is a joint group between ITU and ISO.
Generally, the experts will gather somewhere they think they can make progress on standards, they're not too bothered about which organisation it is. The political level of the ITU is irrelevant - if it screws up, they'll just continue meeting and put a different logo on the final documents.
1) (current approach) Wad up sheets of paper and pile it around the marbles on the tray until they can't roll anymore. After that's done, balancing the tray is just an engineering problem.
2) (political approach) Have two marbles jump off the tray and join the other "foundation marble" in a tripod formation. That way the tray will balance no matter what the rest of the marbles do...