Dear Alejandro Pisanty
> Vint said what he said, in reference to the previous writing he repllied
> to. To my mind, that was that, and it had no room for your agenda this
> time.
It is interesting to get your response.
To raise the problem of someone whoever they be making the Internet
only an soley an entity for e-commerce is *not* to raise my agenda.
The problem is that those trying to take a signficant and important
communications medium developed with a great deal of public funding
and effort and also with the voluntary work of many people, and
which is used for educational, scientific, artistic, library, and
other uses that depend on its essential aspect of making global
communication possible, that those who try to blot out all these
users and instead insist that only a narrow business use is to
be the future -- that is the agenda that is the problem.
To raise the issue of the multiple uses of the Internet that
need attention is a public issue, *not* an agenda issue.
I understand that in the U.S. certain narrow business interests
think they can grab the whole of the society and use it for
their private purposes.
And that they are trying to spread this agenda around the world as
well.
But it is getting very difficult to live in a country where the
whole public sector is being gobbled up by a narrow set of
private interests. And the Internet is one of the important
means of having a public voice and a public means of communication
available to people around the world. It is not to silently ignore
the efforts to take this medium from the public.
That is but one of the reasons that the social form of Netizen
has developed. It has developed in the effort to have an Internet
that is for all to communicate, not for a few to make their riches
by stealing it for some narrow e-commerce agenda.
BTW even businesses need the Internet as a medium of communication.
So the e-commerce narrow agenda is *not* even a business agenda.
>Your agenda is interesting, no doubt. It just didn't fit this time. I'm
> glad you don't let us forget about it.
Can you say when it would fit? Does it seem good to you that
Vint Cerf is only concerned with e-commerce and not with all the
other users of the Internet that make it so important for people
around the world? Does it seem good that that has become the agenda
of the Internet Society?
Surely MCI and IBM and other such companies support their employees
to act to take over the public resources for their own private
use that will serve the companies they work for.
Such companies do not unfortunately encourage their employees to support
the communication purposes of the general public that the Internet
if so important for.
> I am most interested in one point of view from you. What do you think
> of the development of the Internet outside the US and beyond the stage
> where it was the brainchild of some very brilliant, well-funded people
> in the US?
I am interested in knowing more what your question is. It turns
out that the Internet is *not* the brainchild of only people in the
U.S. It is the result of the collaboration of computer scientists
from different countries. For example Louis Pouzin and Hugo Zimmerman
in France worked on creating Cyclades there and in sharing their
work with others working on how to create an Internet. In the
process they made important contributions to the development
of the Internet. The early prototype implementations being created
for TCP/IP included an implementation done by researchers at the
University of London in Great Britain. Researchers from Norway
were involved early on in the work creating the Internet, etc.
So the Internet was not the "brainchild" of "well-funded" people
in the US. It was the result of collaborative activity among
computer scientists from different nations. And there are many
more such examples of important contributions made all along
the way by people from various countries often supported by
government funding for science from their countries.
Thus the public around the world has contributed to the building
of the Internet and deserves to get its benefits, and the narrow
e-commerce agenda to benefit some few business interests, is
in opposition to the public gaining the benefit of the Internet.
Already it is much less valuable for school children because
of the heavy support by the U.S. government for commercial purposes.
And it will have bad affects on the development of science and
computer science if the e-commerce agenda goes forth with no
change.
I communicate with people around the world, and find that people
around the world welcome the Internet as a medium of communication.
E-commerce is a very secondary desire by most users of the Internet.
>And I guess recalling the development of the WWW reassures you
>that this is not only a third-worldistic question.
I agree that the interests of people around the world in the
development of the Internet are important, but fail to see
as the U.S. government support for a few big corporate entities
and their e-commerce agenda is in the interests of most of the
world.
Take a look at the book "Netizens: On the History and Impact
of Usenet and the Internet" that I am co-author of. It has
several chapters about how people who are librarians and educators
and other citizens of the U.S. asked the government not to go
ahead with privatizing the U.S. portion of the NSF backbone as
that would make it harder to spread access to those who these
big corporate entities cannot make profit off of.
The U.S. government didn't listen. So there are now very rich
corporate entities and many people in the U.S. for whom
access to the Internet is beyond their means.
There is a need for a public oversight and functioning in a
society. However, much of the U.S. government, especially
the executive branch, currently thinks it is only the
government for big corporate entities and that the rest
of the population doesn't exist. The big corporate entities
want all the public resources to become their private
property for their private wealth accumulation and
there are government officials trying to accommodate them.
And the newspapers are also run by big corporate entities who
only tell the side of the corporate interests.
So U.S. society is in a very bad situation right now, and what
is happening with the Internet is only a small indication
of how difficult U.S. society has become for the majority of
the people with the taking away of public services and the
public sector. The Internet can help to change this, but instead
it is being grabbed too.
>Alejandro Pisanty
Best wishes
Ronda Hauben
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Netizens: On the History and Impact
of Usenet and the Internet
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/
in print edition ISBN 0-8186-7706-6
