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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.
1000 million? Is he waiting for 1024 million to call it a billion?
Working link to RFC 3271. (Since the original seems Slashdotted.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
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.
"On a related note, the percentage of IPv4-adresses assigned to American (US) organisations, businesses, people is unproportionally high"
Umm, maybe because the internet was *invented* here, and the early adopters got large netblocks assigned? Lets not go all tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist over this, ok? It's not because the US is just mean to you poor downtrodden Europeans, we just had a head start and given the projected usage - that we now know was far below what actually happened - the allocation system wasn't too terribly efficient, because no-one thought it needed to be. As late as the 1996, setting up a business ISDN account with a mid-size local ISP got us a full 254 addresses assigned, even though we only really needed one of them and had just 5 employees. Now, if I still had those addresses, I could probably make more renting them out than the company paid me in salary. Who knew?
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
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.)
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
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
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