On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, Weisberg wrote:
> It is incredible that anyone should have to restate this basic principle
> of our discourse.
>
> Dan Steinberg wrote:
>
> > it's really simple:
> > If any listmember finds another member's posting unpleasant, a waste
> > of bytes, boring, etc. then in the future just hit the delete key
> > without reading their posts. If they post too often or your delete key
> > is getting too much use then
> > set up filters.
>
> Beauty and good sense are in the eyes of the beholder. If a comment is
> faulty, demonstrate the flaw. We will each decide for ourselves whose
> arguments are most on point. Indeed, abusive comments only reflect upon
> the author, not the intended victims.
>
> The form of ostracism proposed is mindless and destructive. It can be
> turned against anyone, and there is no reason to expect that you will
> always be on the serving end of that stick.
Of all the thousands of people who send me email, I filter three. There
is good reason for this in each case. In the case in question I found that
I was getting and reading several pieces of email each day. The email had
no positive content; it consisted of one personal attack after another.
I also found that I was wasting my time reacting to this stuff. I begin
each day by reading and responding to email. So each day was beginning
with a nasty taste.
So I started filtering and my life became more pleasant.
We are under no moral obligation to continue to receive and read email of
no value. On the contrary: there is only so much time. What time and
energy we have should be used constructively.
Speaking of which:
At this point, what the Net needs is a more distributed DNS, one that has
no single control point. What we have instead is ICANN, which is
attempting to control not just the domain name system but the entire
Internet. There is no need to speculate as to motives; as I said in
my earlier posting, the one great lesson of the twentieth century is
that concentrating power in one point is a recipe for disaster.
What we need is diversity and variety, the opposite of what ICANN has on
offer. For an example, consider routing. Routing across the Internet is
handled by a large variety of organizations: ISPs of all sizes, schools,
Internet exchanges of all types (the MAEs are owned by Worldcom, the
LINX in London is a co-op of sorts, I believe that the exchange at CERN
is funded by a consortium of governments, etc), trans-national corporations,
and so forth and so on. There are now more than 12,000 autonomous systems,
each at least potentially representing a different routing policy. The
fearsome power of the Internet comes in large part from the ease with
which anyone can plug into the Internet backbone and pour money and time
into their own notion of how things ought to be done.
This approach works. The approach taken in designing the DNS doesn't.
It has resulted in the last several years of DNS wars, it has led to
the current spectacle in which the remnants of IANA are buried below a
massive, wriggling, jostling pile of control freaks, would-be billionaire
monopolists, middle level government bureaucrats looking for a new world
to tax and regulate, glib politicians (some claiming that they invented
the Internet), and an amazing and diverse assortment of others, all
intent on becoming our rulers. None interested in delivering benefit or
value.
Do I have an instant solution, a quick alternative to ICANN's view of
a global Internet in subjugation to a dull, grey, vast, and omnipresent
Southern California bureaurcracy? No...
But it is in the nature of the Internet that if enough of us put our
weight against this bad solution, other solutions will appear. If enough
of us put our time and energy in working on a variety of diverse solutions,
we will get a DNS -- or something roughly equivalent to today's DNS --
that works remarkably well, has no one central control point, and becomes
more varied and diverse with each passing day.
That's something to work for.
--
Jim Dixon Managing Director
VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316
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Member of Council Telecommunications Director
Internet Services Providers Association EuroISPA EEIG
http://www.ispa.org.uk http://www.euroispa.org
tel +44 171 976 0679 tel +32 2 503 22 65
