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Vint Cerf: 'The Internet Is For Everyone'
Joel Rowbottom writes "Vint Cerf has written a damn fine RFC (3271), entitled 'The Internet Is For Everyone'. It's a good, well-balanced document which details the 'Internet Society's ideology' about the growth of the 'Net, where we can go now, and where we might be in some years' time. Worth a read."
But dammit, I wish it were the same one as mine!
The official RFC3271 page at the IETF is http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3271.txt?number=3271.
Apparently he's forgotten that if you don't have a _computer_ you can't claim your pie of the internet.
Of course, we all do, so let's ignore the problem.
Tea anyone?
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Network Working Group V. Cerf
Request for Comments: 3271 Internet Society
Category: Informational April 2002
The Internet is for Everyone
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This document expresses the Internet Society's ideology that the
Internet really is for everyone. However, it will only be such if
we make it so.
1. The Internet is for everyone
How easy to say - how hard to achieve!
How have we progressed towards this noble goal?
The Internet is in its 14th year of annual doubling since 1988.
There are over 150 million hosts on the Internet and an estimated 513
million users, world wide.
By 2006, the global Internet is likely to exceed the size of the
global telephone network, if it has not already become the telephone
network by virtue of IP telephony. Moreover, as many as 1.5 billion
Internet-enabled appliances will have joined traditional servers,
desk tops and laptops as part of the Internet family. Pagers, cell
phones and personal digital assistants may well have merged to become
the new telecommunications tools of the next decade. But even at the
scale of the telephone system, it is sobering to realize that only
half of the Earth's population has ever made a telephone call.
It is estimated that commerce on the network will reach somewhere
between $1.8T and $3.2T by 2003. That is only two years from now
(but a long career in Internet years).
Cerf Informational [Page 1]
RFC 3271 The Internet is for Everyone April 2002
The number of Internet users will likely reach over 1000 million by
the end of the year 2005, but that is only about 16% of the world's
population. By 2047 the world's population may reach about 11
billion. If only 25% of the then world's population is on the
Internet, that will be nearly 3 billion users.
As high bandwidth access becomes the norm through digital subscriber
loops, cable modems and digital terrestrial and satellite radio
links, the convergence of media available on the Internet will become
obvious. Television, radio, telephony and the traditional print
media will find counterparts on the Internet - and will be changed in
profound ways by the presence of software that transforms the one-way
media into interactive resources, shareable by many.
The Internet is proving to be one of the most powerful amplifiers of
speech ever invented. It offers a global megaphone for voices that
might otherwise be heard only feebly, if at all. It invites and
facilitates multiple points of view and dialog in ways
unimplementable by the traditional, one-way, mass media.
The Internet can facilitate democratic practices in unexpected ways.
Did you know that proxy voting for stock shareholders is now commonly
supported on the Internet? Perhaps we can find additional ways in
which to simplify and expand the voting franchise in other domains,
including the political, as access to Internet increases.
The Internet is becoming the repository of all we have accomplished
as a society. It has become a kind of disorganized "Boswell" of the
human spirit. Be thoughtful in what you commit to email, news
groups, and other Internet communication channels - it may well turn
up in a web search some day. Thanks to online access to common
repositories, shared databases on the Internet are acting to
accelerate the pace of research progress.
The Internet is moving off the planet! Already, interplanetary
Internet is part of the NASA Mars mission program now underway at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory. By 2008 we should have a well-functioning
Earth-Mars network that serves as a nascent backbone of an inter-
planetary system of Internets - InterPlaNet is a network of
Internets! Ultimately, we will have interplanetary Internet relays
in polar solar orbit so that they can see most of the planets and
their associated interplanetary gateways for most, if not all of the
time.
The Internet Society is launching a new campaign to facilitate access
to and use of Internet everywhere. The campaign slogan is "Internet
is for everyone," but there is much work needed to accomplish this
objective.
Cerf Informational [Page 2]
RFC 3271 The Internet is for Everyone April 2002
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if it isn't affordable by
all that wish to partake of its services, so we must dedicate
ourselves to making the Internet as affordable as other
infrastructures so critical to our well-being. While we follow
Moore's Law to reduce the cost of Internet-enabling equipment, let us
also seek to stimulate regulatory policies that take advantage of the
power of competition to reduce costs.
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if Governments restrict
access to it, so we must dedicate ourselves to keeping the network
unrestricted, unfettered and unregulated. We must have the freedom
to speak and the freedom to hear.
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if it cannot keep up with
the explosive demand for its services, so we must dedicate ourselves
to continuing its technological evolution and development of the
technical standards the lie at the heart of the Internet revolution.
Let us dedicate ourselves to the support of the Internet Architecture
Board, the Internet Engineering Steering Group, the Internet Research
Task Force, the Internet Engineering Task Force and other
organizations dedicated to developing Internet technology as they
drive us forward into an unbounded future. Let us also commit
ourselves to support the work of the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers - a key function for the Internet's
operation.
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be until in every home, in
every business, in every school, in every library, in every hospital
in every town and in every country on the Globe, the Internet can be
accessed without limitation, at any time and in every language.
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if it is too complex to be
used easily by everyone. Let us dedicate ourselves to the task of
simplifying the Internet's interfaces and to educating all that are
interested in its use.
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if legislation around the
world creates a thicket of incompatible laws that hinder the growth
of electronic commerce, stymie the protection of intellectual
property, and stifle freedom of expression and the development of
market economies. Let us dedicate ourselves to the creation of a
global legal framework in which laws work across national boundaries
to reinforce the upward spiral of value that the Internet is capable
of creating.
Cerf Informational [Page 3]
RFC 3271 The Internet is for Everyone April 2002
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if its users cannot
protect their privacy and the confidentiality of transactions
conducted on the network. Let us dedicate ourselves to the
proposition that cryptographic technology sufficient to protect
privacy from unauthorized disclosure should be freely available,
applicable and exportable. Moreover, as authenticity lies at the
heart of trust in networked environments, let us dedicate ourselves
to work towards the development of authentication methods and systems
capable of supporting electronic commerce through the Internet.
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if parents and teachers
cannot voluntarily create protected spaces for our young people for
whom the full range of Internet content still may be inappropriate.
Let us dedicate ourselves to the development of technologies and
practices that offer this protective flexibility to those who accept
responsibility for providing it.
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if we are not responsible
in its use and mindful of the rights of others who share its wealth.
Let us dedicate ourselves to the responsible use of this new medium
and to the proposition that with the freedoms the Internet enables
comes a commensurate responsibility to use these powerful enablers
with care and consideration. For those who choose to abuse these
privileges, let us dedicate ourselves to developing the necessary
tools to combat the abuse and punish the abuser.
Internet is for everyone - even Martians!
I hope Internauts everywhere will join with the Internet Society and
like-minded organizations to achieve this, easily stated but hard to
attain goal. As we pass the milestone of the beginning of the third
millennium, what better theme could we possibly ask for than making
the Internet the medium of this new millennium?
Internet IS for everyone - but it won't be unless WE make it so.
2. Security Considerations
This document does not treat security matters, except for reference
to the utility of cryptographic techniques to protect confidentiality
and privacy.
Cerf Informational [Page 4]
RFC 3271 The Internet is for Everyone April 2002
3. References
[1] Internet Society - www.isoc.org
[2] Internet Engineering Task Force - www.ietf.org
[3] Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -
www.ICANN.org
[4] Cerf's slides: www.wcom.com/cerfsup
[5] Interplanetary Internet - www.ipnsig.org
[6] Internet history - livinginternet.com
4. Author's Addresses
Vint Cerf
former Chairman and President, Internet Society
January 2002
Sr. Vice President, Internet Architecture and Technology
WorldCom
22001 Loudoun County Parkway, F2-4115
Ashburn, VA 20147
EMail: vinton.g.cerf@wcom.com
Cerf Informational [Page 5]
RFC 3271 The Internet is for Everyone April 2002
5. Full Copyright Statement
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.
This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of
developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for
copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be
followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
English.
The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.
This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
"AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION
HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Acknowledgement
Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
Internet Society.
Cerf Informational [Page 6]
1000 million? Is he waiting for 1024 million to call it a billion?
If only 25% of the then world's population is on the Internet, that will be nearly 3 billion users. With the current Internet Protocol standard, (four period seperated octants), there are only 4228250625 possible IP addresses. In addition to this, many are invalid for use on the Internet, as they are for local networks or use (172.XXX.XXX.XXX, etc) What happens when we end up running out of addresses? Just something to think about.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Working link to RFC 3271. (Since the original seems Slashdotted.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
That the appeal to bring the internet to everyone is an RFC.
Was anyone else kinda teary by the time they finished reading that?
Noble sentiment, but Mr. Cerf is misguided if he thinks "the Internet for everyone" is going to be accomplished through unquestioning support of the ICANN cabal and the establishment of universal laws to "protect" intellectual property. Both of these seem to be to be a way to destroy, rather than build, the Internet.
Now, if we could replace ICANN with something a good bit more democratic, and put in some globally recognized laws to protect us from IP law's reach, then maybe we'll get somewhere.
The Internet is for everyone except when it's just for Slashdot. (Poor, poor site...)
Look! It's sunny out! It's warm outside!
I bet a lot of geeks are heading out into the Big Blue Room to enjoy the enhanced weather that is out there on the East coast right now.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...until the site you want to use gets slashdotted. And right when I was just about to look up a different RFC (2321 FWIW), too.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I'm not sure I agree with the gushing optimism of this guy. For instance, from the article:
The Internet is proving to be one of the most powerful amplifiers of speech ever invented.
While fundamentally, this is a good thing, it decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and makes it a) easier to hear only what you want and b) harder to find even that. This seems to imply that giving everyone in the world a bullhorn (and keep them from getting shot) is, in itself, a good thing.
And then we turn around and complain about child porn and hate-groups on the internet. It's part of the same thing. I'm just leery of the positive-only spin this article has.
Similarly: The Internet is becoming the repository of all we have accomplished as a society. ... But no mention on having to work through the garbage. While I have confidence that societies will eventually pick the most accurate history, I can't imagine it would be easy.
I in no way think the article is wrong (I don't), just misleadingly in its enthusiasm.
-Thenomain (NMI)
This now concludes our broadcast day.
Vint Cerf seems to view users mainly as consumers. He doesn't even mention the danger of proprietary protocols, trade secrets and patents, and the domination of big media conglomerates, which has already started to divide the Internet in the content-producing Rich and the content-consuming Poor.
It's unfortunate that the days of the beginning Internet mass media, on which everyone could publish more or less equally, rapidly become history, and nobody seems to regret it.
"The Internet is for everyone - but it won't be until in every home, in every business, in every school, in every library, in every hospital in every town and in every country on the Globe, the Internet can be accessed without limitation, at any time and in every language."
Things always go this way - the people built stuffs, useful stuffs, and then the wealthy and powerful will come and take it away.
Internet is just the latest "useful stuff" about to be taken away from us.
Who's the "wealthy and powerful" in this case ?
Ask Hollywood.
Ask Disney's Eisner.
And ask that "Mickey Mouse Senator".
With all the existing and upcoming draconian laws, the Net will be taken away from us.
Not just copyright. Not just royalties.
The Net is what they are after.
We, the Netizens, are "out of control", so they are here to "provide law and order".
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if legislation around the world creates a thicket of incompatible laws that hinder the growth of electronic commerce, stymie the protection of intellectual property, and stifle freedom of expression and the development of market economies.
Even internet hero Vint Cerf agrees that we need strong protection for intellectual property! Surely now you must agree that mass piracy, sharing, and general abusive hacking is causing far more harm than good, and in fact preventing the internet from being for everyone.
He's right. Those who use content should pay for it.
Pay the fuck up!
I'm always struck by how much value there is in simple language presented simply. No flash, no java, no PDFs, no PS, no markup, no bold, no underlines, just straight text. Would this, or any other, RFC be any better presented in HTML? I know there are HTML rendering of the RFCs, but are they really any better.
Whenever I go into a business that really uses their computers for customer service, I note how simple the user interfaces usually are. Most POS,Airlines,Car Dealerships and COMPUTER STORES are still green screens with text. Some are GUI, but have they proved to be any better?
Look, hypertext is great, having multiple applications on the screen (simple GUIs) is great, beyond that has all of our complex presentation really bought us much except narrow the audience of who can receive the information or applications?
The Internet is for Everyone, unless the technologists insist on making it only for a few.
for spammers. Spammers have no right to exist.
Since it's an RFC, here's my C..
The Internet should not be "for everyone", much the same way as driving a car should not be legal for everyone.
Having been a SysAdmin for a number of years, I can tell you that the vast majority of Internet users are law-obiding, decent and considerate people. Then, of course, you have the 1% who want to take such a wonderful gift, and abuse it. They will abuse it for their own personal or financial game, or simply because they get off on making someone else on the other end of their "attack" miserable.
I propose that people should be required to carry a Computer License, which proves they are capable of using the Internet responsibly, in much the same way as you're required to carry a Drivers License to prove you know how to use a car responsibly.
To the vast majority of us, its no big deal. Having a Computer License is no more a threat to one's personal freedoms and rights to privacy as carrying a Drivers License is. For people who have demonstrated a clear-cut lack of understanding of the fundemental governing principles of behavior and usage, their license should be revoked, just as it is for people who have demonstrated a lack of understanding for the basic principles of behavior and usage for a car. While I wouldn't impose fines, and I would not create a police force to apply the law, I would leave it up to the individual ISP to decide how to best apply this for his or her system.
Its only after we do something like I've just described that the net can be cleaned up, and relatively free of abuse, garbage, and other miscellaneous mindbarf.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I am incredibly tired of hearing people constantly spout off how everything would be so much better if service ABC was distributed. It is such a consistant refrain of:
If you stand in front of a bunch of (service-person = ) programmers, and say replace service-name with 'network services' and service-tools with 'computers', then everyone cheers. However, if do substitutions like service-name = "grocery stores/food distribution and production", service-people = "farmers", and service-tools = "farming tools and overalls", people start hemming and hawing -- unless, perhaps, you proposed that in front of a bunch of farmers. Or "sewage services", "sanitation engineers", and "septic tanks." -- unless when proposed in front of bunch of sanitation engineers.
Chaos/freedom yields innovation, but order/discipline yields production. Between the two is a varying place where the efficiency of the resources consumed verses the quality/quantity of what is produced is maximized. People may want the best in everything, but they cannot afford it -- people will pay for the best priced "good enough" -- this does not necesarily drive an improvement in quality, only efficiency. There's a reason why people don't grow their own food, manage their own waste, generate their own electricity, perform their own appendectomies, purify their own water, build their own homes, mine their own ores to hand-forge the nails they need to hammer together the boards they cut from the trees they felled to build their own home, etc. Doing it all yourself might, eventually with practice, yield far superior and customized services/products (from your own point of view), but it requires more effort.
Some people choose to put forth that effort, but equally important is to able to choose not to and buy services from some one else so that a person might focus their energies on their endeavor of choice and excell within that field, not spreading their energies around just to survive.
It is a good thing that if a person wanted to, they could grow their own food, make their own clothing, do everything for themselves -- they may come up with something interesting, after all, and they should be free to. It is also a good thing that if a person wants to buy services from other entities, even (gasp) from a centralized service so that the person may focus on their chosen endeavor -- one rather suspects Stephen Hawking would be hard pressed to grow his own food (without the purchase of considerable automation, at least.) People need to have the opportunity to choose what they want to buy and what they want to do themselves.
It's a bit of a rant, perhaps, but I just disgustedly tired by those who froth at the mouth about how centralized services are bad... while drinking coffee at Starbucks. When they are wearing/using products made in sweatshops in foreign countries while spouting off how "everyone should do their own network services for themselves because centralized service models suck", it's just adding insult to hypocrisy.
Centralized services are not inherently bad, nor distributed services inherently good. They are just models -- only when you map the model to an actual system or process and establish criteria for measuring performance can you then make a judgement on bad verses good. What is good is being allowed to make that decision for one's self and choose the model one wants to use -- no system should be entirely one or the other.
(And as far as not being able to pay for the bandwidth to run a successful site, that's why the Internet needs to go to a pay-to-play model where the people browsing should pay for the bandwith. Then no site is 'penalized' for success.)
I just lost a lot of respect for Mr. Cerf. He doesn't seem to get it. "Parental" controls an IP "protections" close of the internet from everyone.
A member of the Internet Society told me there was a power grab there recently where they took away the voting rights of the members and gave most of the power to corporate sponsors and the IETF.
Should Cerf now be reclassified as enemy of freedom?
Calling a decree to take away the internet under that friendly headline is the same tactic used when the US congress calls internet censorship bills "child protection" bills. He may just be ignorant, but I think we have to consider he may just be evil now. It happens.
All those ass-holes want to do is to get you to buy more shit. They don't give a fuck about content except that its something that the media companies use to string the ads together.
As for the copyright scamming content providers they don't make money one all the new shit, the old stuff that they own the copyright to makes them money. They only reason for promoting the new artists du jour is to churn the inventory and screw the consumer.
There is NO room for originality, creativity or for the artist to make a dime from it.
Might as well throw in the towel on the media outlet controlled web and use an alternate channel of what's left.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Anything that prevents this, NAT, DHCP with static DNS, "transparent" proxies, draconian firewalls or usage policies, is bad. Unfortunately, many Internet users are second-class citizens, limited by technology or corporate policy to the status of "information consumers".
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
By 2008 we should have a well-functioning Earth-Mars network that serves as a nascent backbone of an inter- planetary system of Internets
Anyone else finds it absurd to have a round trip time of almost half an hour?
This does sound crazy at first when one looks at conventional TCP as the basic data transfer mechanism. Latency is a bandwidth killer, and the bandwidth delay product here would mandate enormous window sizes and low tolerance for errors. The latter could be reduced with forward error correction on a lower layer, but I supsect that many or most of our mainstream apps would need to be tuned for the latency.
On the other hand, consider the UUCP, BBS, Fidonet, USENET, or other services we used to use (or still do). Those file transfer mechanisms are not well suited for interactive use, but are perfectly usable for bulk transfers. One obvious application here is for intelligent (preloading) web cache servers. Email would take longer to arrive, but would otherwise not suffer.
I am intrigued with the possibilities of some of the P2P file sharing clients in this application. While Napster seemed to bring the expectation of immediate, almost interactive, file transfers, others like edonkey seem to have the idea of finding the desired files from an index, and having your client wait (possibly for days) until one or more copies are available for transfer. The current approach is probably well suited for the case of distributed copies where the peers are often off the network, but might be readily adapted to the extremely remote, high latency environment.
A dingo ate my sig...
A lot of network hardware such as your DSL bridge is 'hardcoded' for ipv4 packets. this hardware needs to be replaced (or have a firmware update if you're lucky) before ipv6 can fly.
On an ipv4 net ipv6 packets are not malformed. The hardware should simply have checked the version bits in the header and dropped the packets, but the people that made it probably didn't bother since there existed only ipv4 when they made it and they could save to transistors by not checking. So the fool at the ISP that told you that you could use ipv6 (you did call them didn't you) should have his fingers slapped.
What you tried to do was pass ipv6 packets onto an ipv4 based network, you would have needed an ipv6 to ipv4 bridge (before your ipv4 to xDSL bridge)
Anyway to get The Internet to support ipv6 a lot of the infrastructure has to be updated, I wouldn't expect to see that too soon. The 'killer app' we need to get ipv6 out may be streamed HIGH quality video (don't need cable when you have internet) that uses ipv6's priority value to get through.
No thanks. We'll stay with IPv4. You use the new thing. Just like it is with the imperial vs. metric unit systems.
So in a few years when we have got TV over the internet you will stick to your overpriced (you'll be the only customer remember) ipv4 connection, that makes your ipv4 packets get the lowest priority through the internet. Just because you tried the new stuff a little too early?
And without ipv6 we won't get that huge address space that will give everyone and his dog (and the dog's fleas) their own unique IP address
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
I'm sure that the original idea was that everybody could just apply for network numbers because that's what I did in '95 and they're still there although they subsequently became totally unroutable. But that's a long story that would be redundant for some and would take awhile to explain to others. Suffice it to say, IPV6 is certainly keeping with the spirit of the internet as it was. Numbers for all, I say --and no, not for money, just for the sake of the net.
And while we're passing out numbers, let's pass out letters as well. Why we can't have at least several hundred thousand or a million top level domains still escapes me. The domain name system was supposed to humanize the network by making addresses easy to remember. Bravo, good work. But the next step is to allow complete sentences because it is really a sentence rather than a word that encapsulates a thought and serves as a convenient unit of memory. I'm sure this will provoke some harsh facts of life lectures on routing tables or some esoteric aspect of DNS that I'm not aware of, but that's cool. It's a request for comments and those are my comments.
what are new TLDs going to accomplish? There is no (problematic) limit to the number of addresses that can exist under just one TLD. If you're trying to escape the crappyiness of ICANN/verisign/network solutions or whatever they call whoever controls DNS, then 1) who do you think is going to run the new TLDs? 2) if someone else running name registration is good, why not commit your energy to putting them in charge of the existing TLDs?
--
Benjamin Coates
The key issue in your statement is "attempts to impose". You can have voluntary order/discipline -- cooperation, agreed upon standards, etc. The courteous anarchy your refer to. You have made the assumption I meant "imposed order".
I would rather say that people working together produce more than people who do not work together, thus order/discipline yields production. The statement does not imply one way or the other whether or not the order and/or discipline came from within or was imposed from without.
How exactly would you propose to have a workable decentralized system without some sort of standard or order? You could easily come up with an unworkable system, granteed, but a workable one, a productive one -- a useable one -- would require some level of cooperation/standards and the discipline to stick to the cooperation/standards.
In some states, you can get your drivers license taken away for being a minor in possession of cigarettes, without regard to your proximity to a car. Note that cigarettes don't affect driving.
A 'computer license' could and would be abused.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
most likely running Windows. So there you go. Vint, another Microcerf.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Because the world governments can't stand it. And neither can the average citizen. Imagine, a world were everyone can say and do what they like and the only way they are kept in check is because everyone owns a gun. That's essentialy what the internet has to be in order for it to be perfectly free and the average human and government drone is very much afraid of this. The internet is truly anarchy at it's hight. The only way to not get bombarded is to not go there in the first place. It places the entire burden of censoring on you. You decide what you want to see, hear and read, not the government. Unfortunately, untill everyone on line is able to effectively hack everyone else, this can't really exist because some people are evil. So what you will have is a sort of sci-fi post appocolpse world. Average citizenry will have a little bit of space for it self, but will constantly be in danger of lossing that space or having it attacked by evil people (Black-hat hackers) The only protection people will have is a self regulating group of white-hat hackers who will act as world wide vigilantes ensuring people are given basic freedom on the net. The net will be in a constant state of informational warfare, but that's what human nature is all about. Information, knowledge, is real power, and that's how the internet will be regulated, by the intelligent and the smart. And like everything in life, when it becomes corrupt, the highest regim will be overthrown. The internet is the electronic version of earth. Nothing more, nothing less. Except, people online are regulated by outside laws. The only way for the internet to truly be free is to cut it loose from law and let it self regulate, just like the real world does. You think I'm crazy, but think about it, read it again, it makes sense.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
but the domain namespace is the sole property of ICANN, to be leased as they allow.
<sarcasm>Thanks a lot, Vint.</sarcasm>
deus does not exist but if he does
Why do people take Vint Cerf seriously? He is the Chauncey Gardner of the Internet, someone who is not very bright, but thought of highly when his only accomplishment was just Being There.
Vint works for Worldcom, the largest backbone/commercial ISP and second-largest long distance company. He has Worldcom's interests in mind, not the public's. He has learned to say "Internet" all over the place, making his about as "k3wl" as the bozos who were putting "dot com" in company names a few years ago. But he never, ever actually understood the Internet. His most significant early work was TCP, but if you examine the protocol (and compare it to, say, TP4), you notice just how ugly and stupidly written it was. Nice experiment but it should have been thrown out 20+ years ago. Proof that good enough is the enemy of the best.
Vint's the bozo who changed his IAB vote from TUBA to IPv6 about ten years ago. They were ready to move ahead to TUBA as a new IP. It was already implemented in many end systems and most routers. But for political reasons, the grotesquely inferior IPv6, which is a Yugo-quality work, was adopted when Vint put IETF politics above quality.
Now he's flogging ICANN, which is trying to turn the Internet into a private club for copyright holders, leased on a per-use basis to sheepish consumers. Jones & Day, the law firm that created ICANN to enrich its own pockets, uses Vint as window dressing (a Chauncey role) and to keep Bernie Ebbers in line. If Worldcom dissented, ICANN would be toast, and the Internet maybe would have a chance of being for everyone. Vint's vote is with Disney.
Hardly. The US has always been an excellent source of agricultural production, much more so than say the Soviet Union in its day. Freedom yields innovation, sure. But attempts to impose order and discipline on fundamentally disordered processes yield considerably more chaos than does courteous anarchy.
Anonymous Patriots strike again -- what an idiotic example! Colombia, Argentina and Chile are even better ones regardless of their governments -- have you guys even looked at the map and checked in what latitudes most of the former Soviet Union is located? Or -- gasp -- climate zones?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
We've had proof by example, intimidation, vigorous handwaving, cumbersome notation, exhaustion, obfuscation, picture, vehement assertion and appeal to intuition.
Now we have 'proof by reference to google'
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Free speech should not be "for everyone", much the same way as driving a car should not be legal for everyone.
Having been a Nazi for a number of years, I can tell you that the vast majority of political speakers are law-obiding, decent and considerate people. Then, of course, you have the 1% who want to take such a wonderful gift, and abuse it. They will abuse it for their own personal or financial game, or simply because they get off on making someone else on the other end of their "attack" miserable.
I propose that people should be required to carry a Speech License, which proves they are capable of using free speech responsibly, in much the same way as you're required to carry a Drivers License to prove you know how to use a car responsibly.
To the vast majority of us, its no big deal. Having a Speech License is no more a threat to one's personal freedoms and rights to privacy as carrying a Drivers License is. For people who have demonstrated a clear-cut lack of understanding of the fundemental governing principles of behavior and usage, their license should be revoked, just as it is for people who have demonstrated a lack of understanding for the basic principles of behavior and usage for a car. While I wouldn't impose fines, and I would not create a police force to apply the law, I would leave it up to the individual publishers to decide how to best apply this for his or her system.
Its only after we do something like I've just described that free speech can be cleaned up, and relatively free of abuse, garbage, and other miscellaneous mindbarf.
How we know is more important than what we know.