Once the vague 'authority' of the USG is withdrawn from IANA in Sept. 2000,
what will take its place? How do we account for the fundamentally
cooperative nature of the Internet, yet avoid the awful p-word? Isn't it
just possible that what makes this whole damn thing work is something a
little more than private? We don't have to use the dirty word 'public,' but
can't we find some way to account for the cooperative action which the
Internet needs for all of our benefit?
Hi Craig,
The USG is irrelevant to this. IANA helped coordinate three
disparate administrative functions that are predominantly
done by others. You can look at the Internet as something
akin to the economy. It works because there is a common
incentive to make it work, and everyone finds ways to
accommodate the various disparate systems.
Everybody seems to deny the importance of the USG-funded predecessor
networks, but nobody can convince me that what we now know as the Internet
Who denies this? Sure it was important. However, what does
this have to do with what we're discussing here?
Here's a question, without the predecessor networks, whose basic
architecture we still use, just how would something like the Internet, as
opposed to something like AOL, have arisen?
AOL was a single private network. The Internet is not a
network at all, but a means of sharing resources across
networks - largely due to the vision of Bob Kahn. That
paradigm is what's important, and what the wannabe controllers
don't understand.
Think about the instant messaging war going on and think about how far
'private network' thinking will get us as we try to defend the Internet from
the @Homes, AOLs, and Microsofts of the world, who have a lot more money
than any of you private network owners out there.
ditto the paradigm.
--tony
