________________________________________________________________________________ ========================================[from: Ronda Hauben ]== Following is a post that appeared on the IFWP list about ICANN and the history of the Internet. I felt this is an important issue that folks on Nettime would be interested in as well. Ronda "A.M. Rutkowski" wrote: > Craig McTaggart wrote: >>For ICANN to work, it needs to acquire the kind of legitimacy which ANSI and >>ISO enjoy. That is, recognition by all (okay, almost all) parties involved, >>based on widespread confidence that it can impartially carry out its work in >>the public interest. > >>There is more than one kind of 'private organization'. It is worthwhile >>going a little further and explaining what one means by 'private' because, a >>s Tony says, "it does make a difference." Some kinds of private >>organizations are more appropriate than others when the global public >>interest in the governance of the Internet is involved. >Thanks for the great discussion and proffered language. >It's worth noting, however, that as to your own preference of >organizational constructs, the bodies you reference have >stridently opposed the Internet's development over many years - >attempting instead through de jure methods to impose their >global public "internet" models and standards on the world. >Indeed, their arrangements still exist in parallel to the >Internet. ANSI, for example, is the official registry-registrar >for the US domain under the ITU-T F.401 root. >The Internet developed as it did - in the face of those bodies - >through private sector, business initiatives and bottom-up, >collaborative, de facto standards and arrangements. It was >the Ciscos, Suns, Microsofts, and countless other companies and >entrepreneurial developers who made the Internet happen, not >those global public interest bodies. > >The two paradigms are worth reflecting on in going forward. >--tony This is very interesting Tony as you are completely falsifying the history and development of the Internet. The Internet has been built via 35 years of battle against the kind of private entrepreneurial development you claim as its heritage. First of all, the companies you cite, Sun and Cisco were created *not* via private sector, business initiatives, but in fact via DARPA. So these companies are not the result of some beneficient private sector creation process but the result of research done at public expense and then companies being created at public expense. This is a kind of government creation and support of corporate entities who then claim no obligation or interest in any public purpose. And Microsoft got its beginnings from the hobbyists who created the personal computer revolution and from John Kemeny and those who created BASIC, and then it is to be certain has had a hefty dose of support from defense contractor funding. And the original impetus for what has come to be known as the Internet grew out of the funding of interactive computing research to create something very different from the vision of the computer industry, i.e. IBM in the 1960s projected as what computers should look like. And the Internet is the product of the time-sharing research, packet switching research, and internetting research that was funded by the U.S. public as part of the basic research in computer science done by ARPA. The private sector couldn't and didn't develop any Internet. The U.S. government continues to provide all kinds of support for the so called private entities that are now trying to divert the constructive direction of Internet development that is the product of the computer science research that gave it its birth, and instead to try to divert it into a direction to mimic the old rather than to continue to create new computer communication developments for the people of the world. Why are you falsifying the history of the Internet? What are you trying to do with your championing of ICANN as a means of taking control of the Internet from the processes and entities that have been responsible for an important new development? Also while there was pubilc funding of those attending the IETF meetings, the issue of what would serve the long term interests of the Internet could be the direction of concern, and hopefully that still is the direction of concern of enough of the participants. However, more recently those who are serving the interests of big corporate entities are in the position where their corporate interest is their concern and the long term interest of the whole Internet is less something they are in a position to care for. However to place the IETF under ICANN which is being created via some secret process to represent only big and powerful players is to set in motion a very vicious attack on the Internet. The cooperative standards process is the crucial aspect of the Internet that makes it something that can welcome those with varying networks. This is essential to the conception of tcp/ip as a glue for the communiication across diverse networks, for an internetworking of diverse packet switching networks. Obviously that seems to be a conception you have trouble with. Otherwise you would try to accurately examine what has made the Internet possible, and what has made the IETF possible. ARPA and the Internet were possible because a government institution had been crafted to make it possible for scientists to function within the U.S. Dept of Defense. ARPA was formed through an important process that meant that it was created in a way to protect against the competition that was going on in the different branches of the Services at the time. And that competition also had to do with the corporate contractors who were pressuring the Services to give them contracts or to maintain their contracts. The challenge when creating ARPA was to find a way to protect it from that competition and this continues to be a challenge. You are trying to set up ICANN as the essence of the competition, rather than looking to find any way to protect the IANA functions and the IETF functions from the compettition of the most vicious form. And it seems that the clue to the problem that your proposals represent is that you are so hostile to the public origins and purpose of the Internet and only champion some narrow private sector interests and try to gain for them whatever advantage you can at the expense of the Internet and the public around the world who are dependent on it, or who should have the ability to have access to it. . What handouts are you trying to gain and for whom? Ronda P.S. I have been working on a paper about the origins of the Internet via goverment and the computer science community and will be glad to make a draft available when it is done to those who might be interested in exchange for comments. ================================================================================ ======================================[from: Mark Stahlman ]== Ronda: There's beginnings and there's beginnings. There's ideas, there's dreams and then there's actually making it all real. There's Internets and there's Internets, too. And, then there's causality. The Internet of DARPA fame is not the Internet of Sun Microsystems/Cisco fame is not the Internet of Amazon.com fame is not the Internet of realdolls.com fame. I coined the term "Network Computing." What does this mean? That I was the first to think of it? No. I wasn't. It means that I used the phrase in a evocative enough way at the right time such that it became compelling enough to be used by dozens of companies. Made it useful. Literally "coined" it (as in turning the phrase into coinage). I also coined "New Media" and "Silicon Alley." Same thing. Not first. But at the right place at the right time. To "coin" is to catalyse. Think of a seed-crystal dropped into a supersatuated solution. Or, rainmaking. The Internet which we are familiar with today is many things. It is a collection of various mediums all based on the same underlying technologies. (See the thread "Internet as a Meta-Medium or a Sub-Medium Bag-O'-Bolts?" on the media ecology listserv archive.) The Internet of today's headlines is neither TCP/IP nor HTML nor SunServers nor Cisco routers. This Internet is a medium (or really several) which probably no one -- especially those who created these various technologies -- had a really good idea about how it was going to happen. Many, as we know from the good-ole days of com-priv, actively didn't want any of this to happen at all. The medium is the message and the audience is the content. Remember? The *content* of the Internet is the people who use the Internet. The users. The audience. Now, exactly which DARPA project invented these people? Which DARPA project understood that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War would conclude and the dominant mass medium of that war, television, would begin to be challenged by another mass medium (or rather several) which would be premised on mobility, interactivity, many-to-many communications, propaganda-defeating, craziness-feeding, greed-provoking, privacy-stealing, thought-providing, fear-fueling, salvation-promising desires of a millenial worldwide population. None. DARPA had no clue. How could it. DARPA never read McLuhan -- particularly on the topic of formal causality. If you wish to assign credit, causal they-made-it-happen kinda credit, then you must understand the topic of causality. What *causes* what? Efficient cause, neccessary cause, final cause and formal cause. Causality. When you are dealing with a specific technology, that's one thing. When you are dealing with a mass medium (or rather several), that's quite another thing. What is the formal cause of the Internet? The audience. Have a nice day, Mark Stahlman P.S. None of the foregoing is to be construed as an endorsement of the use of domain-name policy as a "Trojan Horse" to attack national sovereignty. That's a cause of an entirely different color. ================================================================================ ================================[from: Johan Hjelm ]== Well, the Internet of today is not the Internet of yesterday, any more than the newspapers of the 1950's were the New York Sun of the 1910's. Development is inevitable (it's either that or death). The question of course is which direction the development takes - and this is where we can influence it. People form organisations. Organisations form policy, which shapes technology. So: People form technology. But not directly. The luxury of developing technology for its own sake belongs to very few - and may not even be interesting. When George Soros invests his money in charity, it is not in a better technology. It is in the use of technology for the improvement of the interactions of people. Remember, DARPA was not an organisation of idealists. They funded research in packet switching to see if a network could be developed that could enable the US war machine to become more efficient than its enemies. Of course, the motivation of the students and teachers who actually did the job was different from those who financed them. Still, it was not to create the information society. The people who developed this Internet continues to guide its development. Curiously, they are now the braking blocks on the standardisation and implementation of brave new concepts (if you doubt me, witness the fate of HTTP-NG in the IETF). ICANN could have been a fresh start on an new form of governance of technology development, but it is on the way of becoming something which is botched whatever happens. Its philosophy seems to be half governement, half corporation, with the wrong part of both. Should we take the stance that ICANN needs the legitimacy of ANSI and ISO, there is an easy option: Close it and hand the responsibility to the ITU. There, you have an international organisation that has successfully been handling communications issues for more than a hundred years. And it is a UN organisation, to boot. But the US governement did not choose to do that, since they want to maintain some level of control over ICANN - and the Internet. Remember, they could expropriate the assets of ICANN (a Californian non-profit organisation), but the same thing is impossible for any nation with respect to the ITU. If it is international governemental legetimacy we need, the ITU is the only way to go. If the idea is to create a new kind of governance, fair enough. Creating ICANN is an option. But is that what is happening? Johan -- ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ personal home page: http://www.42forlag.com/Johan/whois.htm ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ Bet you didn't know that: In 1998, more people visited Disneyworld than took the Hajj (the Moslem pilgrimage to Mecka) ============================================================ ================================================================================ ======================================[from: Mark Stahlman ]== Johan: Yes, I believe that a *new* form of governance is exactly what is being attempted. Your choice of Soros is a good one. His effort to catapult his ideas about a *new* form of global bank off the back of last year's economic meltdown are the case in point. Leave the World Bank and IMF in place, he says, but supercede them with *my* new bank. The UN still exists, but it has been superceded in Serbia by NATO. (Which is one of the big issues in the current talks, since Russia and others want to bolster the UN.) NATO still exists, but the EU is going to build their own force (with past NATO-head running it) to potentially supercede NATO. We are in an era where "world government" is toying with superceding the institutions which were put in place following WW II. Nixon scrapped Bretton Woods, but now the approach is to carve out new areas of responsibility and gradually emasculate the older institutions. So goes the attack on the nation-state, for instance. Many believe that ICANN is a part of this larger puzzle. As a completely new (or so it is claimed) phenomenon, the Internet deserves a new institutional approach. Those who believe that Esther Dyson, for instance, is simply a anti-statist, libertarian on the one hand, or an auto-cratic, backroom schemer on the other hand, miss who she is, her history and her context. Best, Mark Stahlman P.S. Few anylonger view the key early Internet funding as simply an attempt at Cold War net-hardening. The more accurate view is that the Net (and related technologies) arose largely as a result of ARPA's interest in finding a way to get (often arrogant) top scientists together to brainstorm without having to put them on planes. (Rarely did this brainstorming have "operational" goals, btw.) This was augmented by sincere efforts (yes, with military funding) to enhance human communications in general -- quite idealistic, as it turns out -- which were understood and approved at the highest levels in the funding agencies. The notion that the military (or spy agencies) is out to kill and not to change society -- even "progressively" -- is not supported by the historic record. Now, as for George Soros' idealism . . . ================================================================================ # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 1999 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org