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Vint Cerf Talks About Internet Changes
1) What do you think about Anonymnity?
by Planesdragon
Although there's a certain moral argument to an individual's right to privacy, there's also a statistical argument that people simply act irresponsibly when given anonymnity.
What's your take on anonymnity in the internet? Is a good thing? A bad thing? Just a thing not worth talking about?
Vint:
Anonymity is very much worth talking about. The right to privacy is sometimes manifested as a right to anonymity. Window shopping and cash transactions should not require one to reveal identity - and many people feel the same about surfing the net. In some cases, it might be argued that it is sufficient merely to protect 3rd party access to identity information but to require network users to reveal identity. In cases where whistle-blowing is at issue, or reporting of some kind of crime, anonymity may be important to protect. However, the same protection can also lead to potential abuse, as you suggest above. The ability to exploit anonymity, rather than to be legitimately protected by it, creates a genuine conundrum. So this is indeed worth talking about - I'd be interested in your further thoughts.
2) DRM?
by GreyWolf3000
What is your perspective on DRM? Specifically, do you think that the Fritz chip, Palladium, and lobbying of the MPAA/RIAA, will change the Internet fundamentally? Can the Internet be tamed at this point? If so, do you find this DRM and such to infringe upon fair use? Is there legitamacy to the common fear that in the future, computers themselves, in order to gain access to the Internet, will have so many restrictions that the Internet itself will begin to suffer from it?
Vint:
I am very concerned about legal policies that are either technically unenforceable or which would have the effect of crippling an entire genre of digital technology. Some of the DRM positions, such as those expressed in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that make it illegal to study and publish information about cryptographic methods that might be used to protect intellectual property, are unrealistic and fundamentally unsound. Your concerns strike me as well-founded. While I do believe that techniques for protecting intellectual property are desirable, I am troubled by arguments that essentially make it impossible to allow SOME information to be freely shared, if the parties producing it so desire. The Internet is a big tent and should be able to support many different models of operation ranging from highly protected information to completely open information.
3) Commercial Email's Early Days
by ekrout
As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, you led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet.
As most engineers know, we have to make some sacrifices with every project and get rid of certain features that we had hoped would be there but cannot due to monetary constraints, etc.
Could you explain some of the more difficult decisions you had to make as the head of this particular project? Moreover, was there ever a point in the project where no one thought the final product was viable?
Vint:
This project had its beginnings in late 1982. One of the most difficult decisions that Dave Crocker and I faced in the design of the underlying technology was the departure from linear addressing to allow for multiline "addresses" in MCI Mail. We had undertaken to allow people to send to email targets within the MCI Mail subscriber community, send to postal addresses, to non-MCI Mail destinations (e.g. CompuServe), to Telex destinations and (later) to FAX destinations. We departed from the classical linear addressing structure of Internet email and it took several months of debate before we concluded it was important to accommodate these multiline address structures.
We tried to get the contractors involved (HP, Digital Equipment Corporation, American Management Systems, etc) to use TCP/IP, but you can imagine that Internet and TCP/IP were completely unknown to these parties - as it had only been "rolled out" on a broad scale on the ARPANET on 1/1/1983! So we ended up having to use X.25 and a variety of proprietary protocols developed specifically for MCI Mail for lack of commercial support for TCP/IP.
Email was not well-known in the business sector when we were launching MCI Mail (Sept 27, 1983) and it was hard going to convince business people to use it. We linked MCI Mail to CompuServe as part of the roll-out of MCI Mail, seeking to make MCI Mail more useful by expanding its "connectivity". Generally, it would take from 1983 to 1992 before email became a widely appreciated service in the business world.
4) TCP/IP
by sdjunky
considering your work with TCP/IP protocols what would you change now that you can look back retrospectively to how it has been used/misused. What would you incorporate into designs now that weren't even thought of at the time that TCP/IP was created?
Vint:
I suppose I wish I had decided on a larger address space than 32 bits! (that decision was made in 1977 after a year of argument about it). Moreover, I now believe that it would have been wise for us to incorporate into the design principles the notion that every end unit ("thing with an IP address") has a way to "authenticate" itself to any other end unit. As it stands now, these end devices have to declare their own IP addresses and that leads to an architectural opportunity for deception and spoofing. In addition to that, I wish there had been some opportunity to develop end/end cryptographic methods such as IPSEC to increase the confidentiality of information passing through the net. Ironically, beginning in 1975 I began work on a secured version of Internet with the National Security Agency. Because the details of this design were classified, none of this design could be shared with the uncleared developers at universities and industry engaged in the unfolding design of the Internet.
5) Negatives of the 'Net
by Dirk Pitt
Of all the Internet has evolved to be, in what aspect of it are you the most disappointed?
Vint:
That's a difficult question. Spam, pornographic and hate web sites, the collision of domain names with trademarks, the desire of some authorities to engage in censorship are all examples of aspects of the Internet that I find disappointing. The countervailing examples of enormously valuable information sharing and applications on the Internet seem to me to more than make up for these shortcomings. Generally speaking, the more the Internet becomes infrastructure for all parts of our complex, global society, the more we are likely to see all aspects of that society reflected in the Internet - one has to be realistic about the diversity of the population of users of the net.
6) The most surprising thing?
by zero110
Of all of the surprising uses that people have invented for the Internet, which surprised you the most (good or bad)?
Vint:
I think what surprised me most was the avalanche of content that flowed into the Internet after the invention of the WWW by Tim Berners-Lee and the subsequent rapid deployment of Marc Andreessen's Mosaic implementation of the WWW followed by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer and many other web implementations and applications. Of course, the incredible range of content on the net was equally surprising (or disappointing - see above). Internet radio, video and instant messaging were not surprises because the concepts had been around since the late 1960s and early 1970s but when millions of people have access to these facilities and use them, the ensemble takes on characteristics that are hard to predict based on smaller scale deployments of these capabilities of the past.
7) Internet Governance
by cleetus
The internet, in order to work even at the most basic technical level, needs some standards; some governance. What do you think is the proper scope of that governace/standard setting, who are the constituents, and what are the proper mechanisms for governing?
How do they differ from what we have to day? On the whole, are you optimistic or pessimistic about all this?
Vint:
It is plain that we need standards to assist in making billions of interacting systems compatible - and the voluntary standards developed in the IETF and many others developed by various bodies seem to have been effective means by which this interoperability has been effected. I would distinguish technical standards from the far more general term "governance". That term covers a multitude of issues well beyond technical interoperability. Your question is phrased in a way that leads me to wonder whether you are mixing technical standards development and the legal framework in which the Internet functions. If you meant only to focus on the governance of the standards process, I would submit that the open procedures of the Internet Engineering Task Force have served the community of Internet users and providers well for many years.
I continue to be optimistic that we will sustain and evolve workable mechanisms both for standards development and for the general governance of the Internet, largely in the belief that the system is too valuable not to get the support it needs to satisfy both needs.
by Evro
Did you ever respond to this message from John Gilmore, which asks why you sided against Karl Auerbach, who (to the best of my knowledge) sought to gain access to ICANN's financial documents? From what I can tell, ICANN's only motivation is to make ICANN more influential (i.e. for its directors to line their own pockets). Given that ICANN is technically a nonprofit organization, this doesn't seem very ethical. Anyhow, the email text is below:
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 14:26:26 -0800
From: John Gilmore
Subject: Re: ICANN: Auerbach's Allegations Off Target
To: vcerf@mci.net, gnu@new.toad.com
> "Karl paints this as a dispute between him and ICANN management, but
> nothing could be further from the truth," noted Board chairman Vint Cerf.
> "ICANN management is merely carrying out its obligation to follow the
> wishes of the Board as a whole rather than follow the dictates of any
> single Director."Hi, Vint.
I haven't wanted to disrupt our friendship, so I've held off a long time in telling you what I think about how you are leading ICANN. That's why this message is a little longer than it needs to be; I'm saying things that I've been bottling up for a while.
I don't want to be considered a friend of what you now stand for.
You are on the wrong side of this issue, as you have been on the wrong side of many issues regarding ICANN. If ICANN has secrets about who it is doing backdoor favors with, those *should* be made public. And you, as Chairman, as the most prominent and trusted board member, and as the architect of the openness that should still be in the Internet, should have been way ahead of Karl Auerbach in making them public.
Even if those secrets are never made public, or even if there are no terrible secrets inside ICANN, the activities of ICANN MUST be available to every person on the Board of Directors. Without restriction, without delay, without subversion. By law, and for good reasons.
You have been a rubber stamp for many corrupt ideas out of Network Solutions, Verisign and ICANN ever since your election. When I complained to you in the past, such as when the NSI contract was amended to give them a perpetual monopoly, you said that there was nothing else that you could do. I disagreed with that sentiment then, and I disagree with it now. You could have left the contract the way it was, rather than amend it. You don't even have to make things better to keep my respect; you could keep things from getting worse. But you continue to choose to make things worse. Now you are defending ICANN's lack of openness even with its own elected directors!
ICANN was created to promise openness, transparency, accountability, and competition. It has provided none of those, and actively works every month to reduce what little it has provided. You have worked with it to eliminate, rather than create, those promises.
Opening whatever squirming can of worms that is calling the shots at ICANN is what is needed. I can see that ICANN management is terrified that directors from outside the old-boy network might actually find out the details of what ICANN does day by day. They have eliminated any future threat of that, by eliminating outside directors after this term. And they are delaying the current directors' access to information, in the hope that they can permanently avoid outside scrutiny.
I've been a director of several California corporations. I've read that part of the law myself. I've invoked it in a couple of occasions. I contributed significant funding for Karl's lawsuit. Karl is right and you and the ICANN staff are wrong. And now I find you lying about it in a press release. "ICANN management is merely carrying out its obligation to follow the wishes of the Board as a whole..." ICANN *management* instigated those policies, the board didn't. The board has never even considered them.
Virtually everyone at EFF has been looking for ways that we could help to open ICANN and get it to do what it was chartered to do. I've had to hold them back for years, telling them that participation was a waste of our scarce time -- and that no matter how much time they put in, ICANN would have to get really bad before it would ever get better. I put two years of my own life into the domain-name issues, with CORE. It became clear that the strings were being pulled behind the scenes, because the right answers were relatively obvious, yet the wrong answers got approved, providing billions of dollars of benefit to certain parties with heavy ties to the US military. Rather than ICANN making open decisions and using transparent processes, whoever pulls those strings is still controlling what happens. But under ICANN, the process is even murkier and further hidden from public scrutiny. And you're helping.
All the way back at the start of ICANN, EFF and I proposed amendments that would provide a "Bill of Rights" and a "Sunshine Act" and a "Freedom of Information Act" in ICANN's Bylaws. These were all summarily rejected. ICANN does not give a damn about the fundamental rights of citizens or Internet users. It does not want to operate in. the sunshine. And it does not want information about what it's doing to be made available even to its own directors, let alone to the public. Give me one good reason why such an organization should get even a millisecond more of your support -- or anyone's.
The law gives directors an "absolute right" because directors exist to be INDEPENDENT OF and SUPERIOR TO the management. Each and every director has a separate duty to the company; each one carries it out in their own. way. The Board cannot prevent any board member from merely inquiring into the state of the company. The Board cannot condition any board member's inquiry on agreement to a set of arbitrary terms. Nor can the management. This is not only a good idea -- it's the law.
ICANN is going down, one way or another. Either it will go down like East Germany, with a peaceful transition to governance responsive to the public will, or it will go down like Japan, with big bombs dropped on it. ICANN has lost all semblance of credibility and merely seeks to entrench its unaccountable power.
I have absolutely no idea what you are doing leading that megalomaniac, unaccountable, unresponsive, anti-expression, anti-public-interest organization. Did they take your kids hostage? Did you sell your soul for a mess of pottage? What hold do they have over you?
I used to think much better of you than this, Vint. You can see that even now I'm grasping at straws rather than believe that YOU are one of the megalomaniacs. But the evidence continues to pile up, and I'm afraid it's true. I don't want to be the friend of such a person. I'll see you from the other side of the courtroom. Bye.
John
Vint:
I did not respond to John's letter.
If you think that the directors of ICANN or its staff have any opportunity to "line their pockets" you need to look more carefully at the facts. None of the directors are compensated for their work by ICANN - except for reimbursement for travel expenses and many of the directors pay their own travel costs (or their companies do).
In accordance with the court order arising from Karl's lawsuit, ICANN has released to Karl all the information he has requested, as far as I am aware. The basic dispute was NOT that the information should not be released to Karl but rather whether Karl had absolute discretion to decide what information could be released on the public. ICANN deals with proprietary information supplied by various domain name service providers, for example, and the dispute, as I understood it, revolved around how confidential information would be protected, once released to any director.
I do not agree with John's characterization of ICANN. There is an enormous amount of information that ICANN puts on its web site about all of its activities. Compared to most non-profits, ICANN is far more transparent and provides a remarkable degree of opportunity for inputs from all quarters. Even reasonable people can disagree about such things and in this, John and I plainly see things differently.
9) IPv6?
by Ransak
We've heard the hype and the 'plans' to move to IPv6 for years now, but the USA seems fairly complacent at IPv4. Do you see IPv6 becoming a reality in the near future (2 to 3 years), and from a high perspective, what do you think (besides the obvious running out of addresses) could spur the movement? Or should we not move at all, and depend on network address translation more?
Vint:
Generally I think the pressure will build only when there are a large number of IPv6 enabled devices entering into Internet space (Internet-enabled cell phones, PDAs, set-top boxes, other consumer devices, etc). People often speculate about "killer applications" for IPv6 but I generally believe that the simple availability of large amounts of address space and ease of configuration (plug and play) will be considered sufficiently significant advantages. The mixed IPv4/IPv6 environment will not be an easy one to manage - and Network Address Translation devices that today are used to "stretch" the use of IPv4 space may prove necessary to act as a bridge from an all-IPv4 world to an all (or mostly) IPv6 world. I think it will be 2-3 years before IPv6 has significant penetration but by 2005 I expect to see that happen. There has been substantial progress in implementing IPv6 in Japan and a notable "push" for it in Europe. The slogan "6 by 6" has emerged as a kind of challenge to get to significant deployment of IPv6 by 2006. In a few years, we will know whether this is realistic or not.
10) An internet of the people, or for the people?...
by tekrat
Back when the internet (as we now it) was being developed, it was a government military project.
Vint:
well, it was funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency but it was designed by graduate students at research Universities or research Institutions in the US, England, Norway, Germany and Italy.
However, after the internet revolution (of the early 90's) freed it from being Arpa-Net, we had a "golden age" where anyone could connect, and anyone with enough technical know-how could run a server and become a permanent part of the system.
well, actually, ARPANET was separated into ARPANET (bis) and MILNET around 1983 when Internet was first deployed. Commercial use came around 1989. ARPANET was retired in 1990 and NSFNET in 1995. It was open to virtually anyone with the advent of commercial access and service.
But now we see a day looming in the future where large media conglomerates control it all through draconian service agreements that dis-allow private individuals to run servers in their homes, as well as "linking lawsuits", and patents of obvious business methods, all resulting in an internet where the vast majority of the people can only passively view information rather than interactively take part in providing information.
There are a number of such issues associated with the commercial spread of the Internet - however I don't agree with your conclusion that the majority of people cannot contribute information. My impression is that many ISPs offer opportunities to put information on managed web sites. I think running servers at home is still largely not for the general public but that this will change as servers become more simple to operate and configure (plug and play). Moreover, Internet access providers will seek to offer symmetric, high capacity gigabit ethernet services because this is a most efficient way of servicing a wide range of customer needs.
Do you think it's a "good thing" for everyone to run servers (an internet of the people), or do you believe that it's better for the government and corporations to control the flow of information to citizens (an internet for the people).
I think we will see value in both - moreover, until there is ample, symmetric capacity, users will probably prefer that their server sites be operated by outsourcers and even when home servers seem natural, users may prefer to leave their operation to specialists.
While it seems an obvious choice, remember that the situation we have now, where the internet is the "wild west" and mailboxes are littered with spam, and internet rumours become accidental news stories, is a direct result of an internet "of the people".
So there are pros and cons either way. Basically the question boils down to "do you prefer the wild west" versus "do you prefer a controlled, moderated internet?"
I think if I had to choose, I would prefer the more open environment but I also appreciate the need for legal frameworks and shared practices that are predictable. No one really likes surprises from the Internet Service Providers, for example.
- Vint
"Spam, pornographic and hate web sites, the collision of domain names with trademarks, the desire of some authorities to engage in censorship are all examples of aspects of the Internet that I find disappointing."
It is too sad that this is what MOST of the internet is. There is a lot of good content, but there is 30 metric assloads of pr0n and spam. It is too bad we have to be weary about what we click on, especially at work.
(on an unrelated side note: has anyone else noticed that Google has been pretty slow the last two days? Anyone know why?)
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
I thought we were giving the interview here...
UPv6 is a big challenge. But the fact is that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) got more addresses than The Republic of China alltogether.
We probably have to reorganize the whole thing either way, some day.
-- ess
since the Republic of China is behind the great firewall of china, NAT would be very simple.
does the "fact" mentioned relate to number of real IP addresses or number of IP addresses in use including NATted ones
(the implied question here being does china use nat to ensure that everyone has to go through their firewall?)
Cerf's comments are pretty inscrutable, but I am inclined to think Cerf is on the wrong side of this issue, given that he is not standing up for users' ability to control their PCs.
sulli
RTFJ.
Article text, just in case /. get /.ed.
---
1) What do you think about Anonymnity?
by Planesdragon
Although there's a certain moral argument to an individual's right to privacy, there's also a statistical argument that people simply act irresponsibly when given anonymnity.
What's your take on anonymnity in the internet? Is a good thing? A bad thing? Just a thing not worth talking about?
Vint:
Anonymity is very much worth talking about. The right to privacy is sometimes manifested as a right to anonymity. Window shopping and cash transactions should not require one to reveal identity - and many people feel the same about surfing the net. In some cases, it might be argued that it is sufficient merely to protect 3rd party access to identity information but to require network users to reveal identity. In cases where whistle-blowing is at issue, or reporting of some kind of crime, anonymity may be important to protect. However, the same protection can also lead to potential abuse, as you suggest above. The ability to exploit anonymity, rather than to be legitimately protected by it, creates a genuine conundrum. So this is indeed worth talking about - I'd be interested in your further thoughts.
2) DRM?
by GreyWolf3000
What is your perspective on DRM? Specifically, do you think that the Fritz chip, Palladium, and lobbying of the MPAA/RIAA, will change the Internet fundamentally? Can the Internet be tamed at this point? If so, do you find this DRM and such to infringe upon fair use? Is there legitamacy to the common fear that in the future, computers themselves, in order to gain access to the Internet, will have so many restrictions that the Internet itself will begin to suffer from it?
Vint:
I am very concerned about legal policies that are either technically unenforceable or which would have the effect of crippling an entire genre of digital technology. Some of the DRM positions, such as those expressed in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that make it illegal to study and publish information about cryptographic methods that might be used to protect intellectual property, are unrealistic and fundamentally unsound. Your concerns strike me as well-founded. While I do believe that techniques for protecting intellectual property are desirable, I am troubled by arguments that essentially make it impossible to allow SOME information to be freely shared, if the parties producing it so desire. The Internet is a big tent and should be able to support many different models of operation ranging from highly protected information to completely open information.
3) Commercial Email's Early Days
by ekrout
As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, you led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet.
As most engineers know, we have to make some sacrifices with every project and get rid of certain features that we had hoped would be there but cannot due to monetary constraints, etc.
Could you explain some of the more difficult decisions you had to make as the head of this particular project? Moreover, was there ever a point in the project where no one thought the final product was viable?
Vint:
This project had its beginnings in late 1982. One of the most difficult decisions that Dave Crocker and I faced in the design of the underlying technology was the departure from linear addressing to allow for multiline "addresses" in MCI Mail. We had undertaken to allow people to send to email targets within the MCI Mail subscriber community, send to postal addresses, to non-MCI Mail destinations (e.g. CompuServe), to Telex destinations and (later) to FAX destinations. We departed from the classical linear addressing structure of Internet email and it took several months of debate before we concluded it was important to accommodate these multiline address structures.
We tried to get the contractors involved (HP, Digital Equipment Corporation, American Management Systems, etc) to use TCP/IP, but you can imagine that Internet and TCP/IP were completely unknown to these parties - as it had only been "rolled out" on a broad scale on the ARPANET on 1/1/1983! So we ended up having to use X.25 and a variety of proprietary protocols developed specifically for MCI Mail for lack of commercial support for TCP/IP.
Email was not well-known in the business sector when we were launching MCI Mail (Sept 27, 1983) and it was hard going to convince business people to use it. We linked MCI Mail to CompuServe as part of the roll-out of MCI Mail, seeking to make MCI Mail more useful by expanding its "connectivity". Generally, it would take from 1983 to 1992 before email became a widely appreciated service in the business world.
4) TCP/IP
by sdjunky
considering your work with TCP/IP protocols what would you change now that you can look back retrospectively to how it has been used/misused. What would you incorporate into designs now that weren't even thought of at the time that TCP/IP was created?
Vint:
I suppose I wish I had decided on a larger address space than 32 bits! (that decision was made in 1977 after a year of argument about it). Moreover, I now believe that it would have been wise for us to incorporate into the design principles the notion that every end unit ("thing with an IP address") has a way to "authenticate" itself to any other end unit. As it stands now, these end devices have to declare their own IP addresses and that leads to an architectural opportunity for deception and spoofing. In addition to that, I wish there had been some opportunity to develop end/end cryptographic methods such as IPSEC to increase the confidentiality of information passing through the net. Ironically, beginning in 1975 I began work on a secured version of Internet with the National Security Agency. Because the details of this design were classified, none of this design could be shared with the uncleared developers at universities and industry engaged in the unfolding design of the Internet.
5) Negatives of the 'Net
by Dirk Pitt
Of all the Internet has evolved to be, in what aspect of it are you the most disappointed?
Vint:
That's a difficult question. Spam, pornographic and hate web sites, the collision of domain names with trademarks, the desire of some authorities to engage in censorship are all examples of aspects of the Internet that I find disappointing. The countervailing examples of enormously valuable information sharing and applications on the Internet seem to me to more than make up for these shortcomings. Generally speaking, the more the Internet becomes infrastructure for all parts of our complex, global society, the more we are likely to see all aspects of that society reflected in the Internet - one has to be realistic about the diversity of the population of users of the net.
6) The most surprising thing?
by zero110
Of all of the surprising uses that people have invented for the Internet, which surprised you the most (good or bad)?
Vint:
I think what surprised me most was the avalanche of content that flowed into the Internet after the invention of the WWW by Tim Berners-Lee and the subsequent rapid deployment of Marc Andreessen's Mosaic implementation of the WWW followed by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer and many other web implementations and applications. Of course, the incredible range of content on the net was equally surprising (or disappointing - see above). Internet radio, video and instant messaging were not surprises because the concepts had been around since the late 1960s and early 1970s but when millions of people have access to these facilities and use them, the ensemble takes on characteristics that are hard to predict based on smaller scale deployments of these capabilities of the past.
7) Internet Governance
by cleetus
The internet, in order to work even at the most basic technical level, needs some standards; some governance. What do you think is the proper scope of that governace/standard setting, who are the constituents, and what are the proper mechanisms for governing?
How do they differ from what we have to day? On the whole, are you optimistic or pessimistic about all this?
Vint:
It is plain that we need standards to assist in making billions of interacting systems compatible - and the voluntary standards developed in the IETF and many others developed by various bodies seem to have been effective means by which this interoperability has been effected. I would distinguish technical standards from the far more general term "governance". That term covers a multitude of issues well beyond technical interoperability. Your question is phrased in a way that leads me to wonder whether you are mixing technical standards development and the legal framework in which the Internet functions. If you meant only to focus on the governance of the standards process, I would submit that the open procedures of the Internet Engineering Task Force have served the community of Internet users and providers well for many years.
I continue to be optimistic that we will sustain and evolve workable mechanisms both for standards development and for the general governance of the Internet, largely in the belief that the system is too valuable not to get the support it needs to satisfy both needs.
by Evro
Did you ever respond to this message from John Gilmore, which asks why you sided against Karl Auerbach, who (to the best of my knowledge) sought to gain access to ICANN's financial documents? From what I can tell, ICANN's only motivation is to make ICANN more influential (i.e. for its directors to line their own pockets). Given that ICANN is technically a nonprofit organization, this doesn't seem very ethical. Anyhow, the email text is below:
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 14:26:26 -0800
From: John Gilmore
Subject: Re: ICANN: Auerbach's Allegations Off Target
To: vcerf@mci.net, gnu@new.toad.com
> "Karl paints this as a dispute between him and ICANN management, but
> nothing could be further from the truth," noted Board chairman Vint Cerf.
> "ICANN management is merely carrying out its obligation to follow the
> wishes of the Board as a whole rather than follow the dictates of any
> single Director."
Hi, Vint.
I haven't wanted to disrupt our friendship, so I've held off a long time in telling you what I think about how you are leading ICANN. That's why this message is a little longer than it needs to be; I'm saying things that I've been bottling up for a while.
I don't want to be considered a friend of what you now stand for.
You are on the wrong side of this issue, as you have been on the wrong side of many issues regarding ICANN. If ICANN has secrets about who it is doing backdoor favors with, those *should* be made public. And you, as Chairman, as the most prominent and trusted board member, and as the architect of the openness that should still be in the Internet, should have been way ahead of Karl Auerbach in making them public.
Even if those secrets are never made public, or even if there are no terrible secrets inside ICANN, the activities of ICANN MUST be available to every person on the Board of Directors. Without restriction, without delay, without subversion. By law, and for good reasons.
You have been a rubber stamp for many corrupt ideas out of Network Solutions, Verisign and ICANN ever since your election. When I complained to you in the past, such as when the NSI contract was amended to give them a perpetual monopoly, you said that there was nothing else that you could do. I disagreed with that sentiment then, and I disagree with it now. You could have left the contract the way it was, rather than amend it. You don't even have to make things better to keep my respect; you could keep things from getting worse. But you continue to choose to make things worse. Now you are defending ICANN's lack of openness even with its own elected directors!
ICANN was created to promise openness, transparency, accountability, and competition. It has provided none of those, and actively works every month to reduce what little it has provided. You have worked with it to eliminate, rather than create, those promises.
Opening whatever squirming can of worms that is calling the shots at ICANN is what is needed. I can see that ICANN management is terrified that directors from outside the old-boy network might actually find out the details of what ICANN does day by day. They have eliminated any future threat of that, by eliminating outside directors after this term. And they are delaying the current directors' access to information, in the hope that they can permanently avoid outside scrutiny.
I've been a director of several California corporations. I've read that part of the law myself. I've invoked it in a couple of occasions. I contributed significant funding for Karl's lawsuit. Karl is right and you and the ICANN staff are wrong. And now I find you lying about it in a press release. "ICANN management is merely carrying out its obligation to follow the wishes of the Board as a whole..." ICANN *management* instigated those policies, the board didn't. The board has never even considered them.
Virtually everyone at EFF has been looking for ways that we could help to open ICANN and get it to do what it was chartered to do. I've had to hold them back for years, telling them that participation was a waste of our scarce time -- and that no matter how much time they put in, ICANN would have to get really bad before it would ever get better. I put two years of my own life into the domain-name issues, with CORE. It became clear that the strings were being pulled behind the scenes, because the right answers were relatively obvious, yet the wrong answers got approved, providing billions of dollars of benefit to certain parties with heavy ties to the US military. Rather than ICANN making open decisions and using transparent processes, whoever pulls those strings is still controlling what happens. But under ICANN, the process is even murkier and further hidden from public scrutiny. And you're helping.
All the way back at the start of ICANN, EFF and I proposed amendments that would provide a "Bill of Rights" and a "Sunshine Act" and a "Freedom of Information Act" in ICANN's Bylaws. These were all summarily rejected. ICANN does not give a damn about the fundamental rights of citizens or Internet users. It does not want to operate in. the sunshine. And it does not want information about what it's doing to be made available even to its own directors, let alone to the public. Give me one good reason why such an organization should get even a millisecond more of your support -- or anyone's.
The law gives directors an "absolute right" because directors exist to be INDEPENDENT OF and SUPERIOR TO the management. Each and every director has a separate duty to the company; each one carries it out in their own. way. The Board cannot prevent any board member from merely inquiring into the state of the company. The Board cannot condition any board member's inquiry on agreement to a set of arbitrary terms. Nor can the management. This is not only a good idea -- it's the law.
ICANN is going down, one way or another. Either it will go down like East Germany, with a peaceful transition to governance responsive to the public will, or it will go down like Japan, with big bombs dropped on it. ICANN has lost all semblance of credibility and merely seeks to entrench its unaccountable power.
I have absolutely no idea what you are doing leading that megalomaniac, unaccountable, unresponsive, anti-expression, anti-public-interest organization. Did they take your kids hostage? Did you sell your soul for a mess of pottage? What hold do they have over you?
I used to think much better of you than this, Vint. You can see that even now I'm grasping at straws rather than believe that YOU are one of the megalomaniacs. But the evidence continues to pile up, and I'm afraid it's true. I don't want to be the friend of such a person. I'll see you from the other side of the courtroom. Bye.
John
Vint:
I did not respond to John's letter.
If you think that the directors of ICANN or its staff have any opportunity to "line their pockets" you need to look more carefully at the facts. None of the directors are compensated for their work by ICANN - except for reimbursement for travel expenses and many of the directors pay their own travel costs (or their companies do).
In accordance with the court order arising from Karl's lawsuit, ICANN has released to Karl all the information he has requested, as far as I am aware. The basic dispute was NOT that the information should not be released to Karl but rather whether Karl had absolute discretion to decide what information could be released on the public. ICANN deals with proprietary information supplied by various domain name service providers, for example, and the dispute, as I understood it, revolved around how confidential information would be protected, once released to any director.
I do not agree with John's characterization of ICANN. There is an enormous amount of information that ICANN puts on its web site about all of its activities. Compared to most non-profits, ICANN is far more transparent and provides a remarkable degree of opportunity for inputs from all quarters. Even reasonable people can disagree about such things and in this, John and I plainly see things differently.
9) IPv6?
by Ransak
We've heard the hype and the 'plans' to move to IPv6 for years now, but the USA seems fairly complacent at IPv4. Do you see IPv6 becoming a reality in the near future (2 to 3 years), and from a high perspective, what do you think (besides the obvious running out of addresses) could spur the movement? Or should we not move at all, and depend on network address translation more?
Vint:
Generally I think the pressure will build only when there are a large number of IPv6 enabled devices entering into Internet space (Internet-enabled cell phones, PDAs, set-top boxes, other consumer devices, etc). People often speculate about "killer applications" for IPv6 but I generally believe that the simple availability of large amounts of address space and ease of configuration (plug and play) will be considered sufficiently significant advantages. The mixed IPv4/IPv6 environment will not be an easy one to manage - and Network Address Translation devices that today are used to "stretch" the use of IPv4 space may prove necessary to act as a bridge from an all-IPv4 world to an all (or mostly) IPv6 world. I think it will be 2-3 years before IPv6 has significant penetration but by 2005 I expect to see that happen. There has been substantial progress in implementing IPv6 in Japan and a notable "push" for it in Europe. The slogan "6 by 6" has emerged as a kind of challenge to get to significant deployment of IPv6 by 2006. In a few years, we will know whether this is realistic or not.
10) An internet of the people, or for the people?...
by tekrat
Back when the internet (as we now it) was being developed, it was a government military project.
Vint:
well, it was funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency but it was designed by graduate students at research Universities or research Institutions in the US, England, Norway, Germany and Italy.
However, after the internet revolution (of the early 90's) freed it from being Arpa-Net, we had a "golden age" where anyone could connect, and anyone with enough technical know-how could run a server and become a permanent part of the system.
well, actually, ARPANET was separated into ARPANET (bis) and MILNET around 1983 when Internet was first deployed. Commercial use came around 1989. ARPANET was retired in 1990 and NSFNET in 1995. It was open to virtually anyone with the advent of commercial access and service.
But now we see a day looming in the future where large media conglomerates control it all through draconian service agreements that dis-allow private individuals to run servers in their homes, as well as "linking lawsuits", and patents of obvious business methods, all resulting in an internet where the vast majority of the people can only passively view information rather than interactively take part in providing information.
There are a number of such issues associated with the commercial spread of the Internet - however I don't agree with your conclusion that the majority of people cannot contribute information. My impression is that many ISPs offer opportunities to put information on managed web sites. I think running servers at home is still largely not for the general public but that this will change as servers become more simple to operate and configure (plug and play). Moreover, Internet access providers will seek to offer symmetric, high capacity gigabit ethernet services because this is a most efficient way of servicing a wide range of customer needs.
Do you think it's a "good thing" for everyone to run servers (an internet of the people), or do you believe that it's better for the government and corporations to control the flow of information to citizens (an internet for the people).
I think we will see value in both - moreover, until there is ample, symmetric capacity, users will probably prefer that their server sites be operated by outsourcers and even when home servers seem natural, users may prefer to leave their operation to specialists.
While it seems an obvious choice, remember that the situation we have now, where the internet is the "wild west" and mailboxes are littered with spam, and internet rumours become accidental news stories, is a direct result of an internet "of the people".
So there are pros and cons either way. Basically the question boils down to "do you prefer the wild west" versus "do you prefer a controlled, moderated internet?"
I think if I had to choose, I would prefer the more open environment but I also appreciate the need for legal frameworks and shared practices that are predictable. No one really likes surprises from the Internet Service Providers, for example.
- Vint
I think you mean the People's Republic of China, though your argument applies as well to the ROC, which is Taiwan.
sulli
RTFJ.
So Cerf didn't allow a director to have the information because he was afraid the director might disclose some of it to the public, despite the law (as the judge found) clearly giving any director the right to that information? The only legal and proper course would have been to release the information immediately to the director with - if considered necessary - a warning about which sections were claimed to be proprietary by one party or another. Then if the director released any of that "proprietary" info the party claiming it would have a right to file suit against the director.
Cerf should be ashamed. ICANN should be shut down. His defense - that other not-for-profits are even shadier - should not be tolerated in the current business climate. It's like saying we should give a blank check to corruption at any company that's less corrupt than Enron!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Not according to the filings. Auerbach's complaint was that ICANN staff put unreasonable conditions on his access. Auerbach repeatedly said he was more than happy to comply with any reasonable confidentiality requirements. But ICANN declined to provide financial records, and didn't bother to inform Auerbach directly; six months later, ICANN was still "formulating policy" on the matter.
I don't think Auerbach ever got a copy of the employee handbook he requested.
And he wasn't allowed to make copies of any documents without asking a committee for permission first. Even though California law clearly gives him the right to view and copy whatever the hell he pleases--"all books, documents, and records of any kind"--without restriction. ICANN's own bylaws grant similar rights to all directors.
Unsurprisingly, the court ruled for Auerbach on all counts. The confidentiality issue was a red herring from the start. I wish Vint Cerf would answer the question again, this time without using confidentiality of ICANN's records as an excuse.
I don't know Karl Auerbach. Everything I know about this case came from the publicly available documents.
Why is it that intellectuals think pre-occupation with sex is bad? Ok, there's bad pr0n, but human sexuality has nothing to do with the internet. It's not different than calling a 800 number. A tool is a tool is a tool. And if used correctly, it can be pleasurable.
*ducks and runs*
Best Slashdot Co
Many people seem to be of the opinion that the First Amendment (of the United States Constitution) grants people the right to anonymity. This is very much not the case. There are two separate concepts wrapped up in the term 'anonymity', and the courts have been able to keep these distinct: there is 'unsigned speech', and there is 'unaccountable speech'.
The First Amendment does not say that one has a right to speak anonymously. In fact, a person is often put into a situation where their identity is compelled, especially if they are related to a case where a felony has been committed. One can publish without choosing to sign the publication, but if a publication can otherwise be lawfully tracked to its writer, then that evidence is quite admissible and it is no longer anonymous.
The right to privacy is used somewhat interchangeably with anonymity, but that is not proven in the reading of our Constitution. The right to privacy comes from the Fourth amendment, which guarantees a security within their persons, houses, papers and effects.
There is also the right to remain silent, written into the Fifth Amendment, which protects against a situation where someone is compelled to supply information about themselves or their conduct. Metaphorically, this can be read as an extension of the Fourth Amendment into someone's thoughts: "a brain cannot be seized and searched, one is secure within their own mind."
Lastly, there is a right to face one's accuser; the Sixth Amendment speficially grants the accused all manners of due process. In such a situation, there is no right to anonymity: a witness must divulge their identity to make a credible accusation. The US has a program that tries to secure high-profile testimony without endangering the witness, by helping the witness "disappear" with a new identity, but only after that explicit testimony is rendered.
A person is always to be held accountable for their own actions in a United States court of law; there is no right to being free from accountability.
[
I think running servers at home is still largely not for the general public but that this will change as servers become more simple to operate and configure (plug and play).
I think he misunderstood the issue, though who am I to talk. The problem that the questioner was alluding to is of the service agreements NOT ALLOWING people to run servers at home, as opposed to not being able to.
I have a feeling this is a goatse link, so u prob dont want to click on it.
This is a great aphorism, which truly sums up a lot of thoughts on the good and bad.
Thanks, Dr. Cerf.
[
It's great to be an animal; G-d made you that way, celebrate it!
Or at least be thankful you're not a vegetable.
As for the bad pr0n, it's the repression of sexuality in general that allows bad expressions of sexual content to prosper. Sweden has better pr0n than England, for example, because Swedes don't need to buy bad pr0n to get their rocks off, but it's one of the few options available to Brits.
Part of the reason IP6 is finding so much resistance is because very few people have any experience with it. How can you run a box with the IP6 protocol when nothing on your net will talk to it?
Maybe it would be a good idea to start rolling out firmware versions that will allow people to run IP6 on their intranets. Get their Linksys Cable/DSL routers talking IP6 on the private side of the network. Obviously not everyone would want to do this, but for those who dared to convert it would provide essential experience in IP6 operation. It would also provide a future starting point for when ISPs offer IP6 access.
Whats wrong with porn?
Yeah, I mean there is a lot of Spam, misogynic attitudes, and underhandedness associated with it, but really that's only a product of the fact that porn is supposedly an 'underground' activity in our ridiculously puritan society.
I guess Mr. Cerf feels people shouldn't get off unless they have a significant other of the opposite gender readily available, and only then with the lights off in the missionary position. I mean, after all sex is A Bad Thing especially when there's a number of people that isn't both even and prime.
I say if people want to get naked and take pictures more power too 'em. It would be nice if they could do it without degrading women, spamming, and flooding browsers with popups, of course. But pornography in and of itself isn't bad.
I wonder if Mr. Cerf find European late night television a failure of the promise of TV (among many failings of that particular medium).
Spammers, on the other hand, need to die.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I do now. Sorry, folks.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
The very idea that there are other types of secrets, is exactly what makes me suspect ICANN is up to something inappropriate. When I try to think of what is needed to coordinate names, numbers, and standard interfaces, I just don't see where any sort of "proprietary information" can fit in. What am I missing?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Pff... You know how hard it was for me as a little kid to find porn? When I visited my dad I scrounged the whole house for those playboys, and that was only a few months out of the year. Oh sure, my mom had some things like The Joy of Sex, with it's pencil illustrations, The Kama Sutra, but that hardly counts.
Then, in the early to mid 90s something wonderful happened. The web. And suddenly a vast world of pornography opened itself up to me. Without the internet, I probably wouldn't have been pornographically self-sufficient until I was 18, and I would have had to pay for it. How suck would that be. I mean, can you imagine paying for porno? Even as an adult, porno on the Internet is a wonderful opportunity. Especially in the age of p2p, massive broadband and filesharing...
But seriously though, what's wrong with pornography? I agree that Spam sucks donkey balls, and spammers should be shot in the street, but porn? Whatever.
I think it's unfortunate that a lot of porn sites out there are basically run by money grubbing sociopath, who degrade women and flood screens with popups in a desperate attempted to wring every available penny out of the 'net, the concept of sexually arousing 'art' is hardly evil or wrong, unless you're one of those puritan wank-heads with all kinds of fucked up ideas about sex and masturbation.
In conclusion: sex is good, porn is good, and the Internet is good. People with puritanical value systems, money grubbing wankers, and spammers all suck.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
anytime you let the great unwashed masses publish anything in any medium this is what you will get. has nothing to do with the Internet has more to do with the fact that people suck.
Well, yes, I guess if you want to get technical they suck quite a bit... I would hope they wash up before they do it though, I mean if they're going to be taking pictures.
Seriously though, do you really think people photographing each other naked is "sucky" in any way other then as a bad pun?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
UPv6 is a big challenge. But the fact is that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) got more addresses than The Republic of China alltogether.
Technically you're probably still correct, but you probably meant the People's Republic of China. The Republic of China is a capitalistic democracy with about 20 million citizens. People usually call it "Taiwan" these days. It's called the Republic of China, because the government used to rule all of china, but after the communists took over they fled to Taiwan where they have sat for the past 50 years.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
or back to email... IMHO there's a PhD thesis waiting for someone to study email joke propagation on the Internet and find some sort of sociological relevance to it. After all, someone got a PhD out of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and they drew computer networking conclusions out of that one.
Maybe the TLA (insert favorite one, here) could get involved. Sooner or later Al Qaeda is going to wise up to traffic analysis. Maybe the next way to try and hide communications would be coded and/or steganographic messages in jokes or spam.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This is where things get interesting. Pornography is content that society has deemed unacceptable and thus controlled. The reason why pre-Internet you had to be 18 was because society decided that you were not mature enough to consume the material until that age. And, before someone jumps in with "that evil government", note that it usually is NOT government, but those claiming moral authority in the community that work to impose these limits.
What is interesting is that the Internet has changed the meaning of community. And thus, while there are still voices screaming for the control of this material on the Internet, what is different is that it is not clear who comprises the community, and who can argue for restrictions and controls. There ARE a few examples of successful surpression... Holocost and Nazi issues in Germany come most quickly to mind. But these are few and far between.
I am sure there will be attempts at the Internet equivalent of book burnings to come, yet I have no idea what form they will take nor when that may happen. And that is when you'll see that Pornography is an issue on the Internet, just as it is in our neighborhoods and communities.
that other not-for-profits are even shadier - should not be tolerated in the current business climate. It's like saying we should give a blank check to corruption at any company that's less corrupt than Enron!
Well, given the fact that he works for WorldCom, a company that's made up about $10 billion (that we know about) compared to Enron's $300m or so, it's not to surprising.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yeah well Dabney Eats It...MIT just has the class A.
Whats wrong with porn?
I have to agree that lumping porn in with spam (which no one likes) and hate sites is really uncalled for. If some college girl wants to put herself through school by selling access to naked pictures of herself and I want to engage in a little bit of sexual escapism by looking at those pictures, I don't see how society has been harmed in any way. I know that some people object to porn because it is dominated and controlled by some seedy men. But I would argue that the explosion of internet pornography has actually empowered women working in the adult industries to have more control over their careers. Certainly Danni Ashe has succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. The women can instantly become managers and distributors of their own content and do not have to 'pay' men (either with money or some other compensation) to break into or maintain a presence in the adult world. Several porn stars have curled up with a book and taught themselves to become their own webmasters so they don't have to rely on anyone else. I think this is a positive development.
I wonder if Mr. Cerf has given any thought to the role of the internet is changing pornography or whether he just hates porn in any form.
GMD
watch this
I have a feeling this is a goatse link, and I really want to click on it!
With IPv6, it will become impossible to remember the numbers. That will make life a little tougher for the home-lan enthusiast and small businesses. DNS will simply gain importance - also on the intranet.
Stop the brainwash
... Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) got more addresses than The Republic of China alltogether.
;-)
Yeah, well, this is appropriate, because MIT has more computing devices than China does.
And we won't have to reorganize it; we've already done that. It's called IPv6. If the Chinese would have the brains to use it, they wouldn't have any address problems.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It is not in and of itself, a disappointing use of the Internet.
Not to you. To a person who considers porn immoral, and wants to see other people act morally, it is very disapointing. I don't know his stance on such things, but the question was what was disapointing to him. Your ability to effectively argue that he shouldn't be disapointed by it has nothing to do with wether he is or not.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
I can't believe some of the arguements I'm reading in support for internet porn. There's not one comment on the affect it has on kids. My brother, 17 years old, has gone from a 3.5 average to a 2.0 since his freshmen year. He had a passion for web design at about age 13, and its been all down hill since. He shows no signs of passion for anything these days. We've busted him on internet porn so many times its become a running joke in the family. The fact is that he's addicted to porn. If you think this is rare, think again. All of his friends are going through the same thing. Him and his friends have been caught selling porn at school. They trade porn, hell, porn has become the new baseball card. So in conclusion, Internet porn left alone to adults is not so bad, because anything in moderation is usually ok, aside from crack cocaine, and most adults can moderate their porn addiction, which is still also debatable. However kids do not exercise moderation, they don't understand it. So it leads to an obession that could easily destroy their chances for success and stability, both mental and financial. Your thoughts?
NAT is an anathema to a truly connected Internet, where there is true peer to peer connectivity (this is not about peer to peer filesharing. There's far more you can do peer to peer than that).
Dude, there is no way I would ever allow any device on the Internet to initiate connections into my home network. I run a firewall for a reason, and IPV6 changes nothing in that regard. I don't think that having more addresses will reduce the number of attacks that bounce of my firewall on a daily basis.
Security might even be more important when we move to IPV6 because there would be potentially more systems out there for the script kiddies to 0wn!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Hey GRunT: why the Beck quote? Did your arms get shorter? Your pockets get deeper?
I agree about the non-profit transparency remark. It's a shame that most other not-for-profits are opaque and perhaps up to no good, but for ICANN to be as open as it is should go without saying (or praise). It's the least the organization can do, and reminds me of the Chris Rock joke. Wanting to get credit for what they're supposed to do... I ain't never been arrested! I take care of my kids!
But maybe you don't consider Stanford an educational institution.
ISPs are value-added resellers, who sell a product based on queuing theory.
What you seem to be confused about is the two parts to the charge, which normally isn't seperated out on DSL and other smaller connections.
There's line, and there's port.
Line is the charge for the connection between you, and the ISP. Sometimes there's markup, sometimes there isn't. There's normally markup if the ISP owns the equipment used to terminate the line. No real queuing here when you're dealing with a form of dedicated circut, which would be basically anything but standard dial-up.
Port is the charge for your data to reach the internet. You always have to deal with queing theory here, or well, everyone gets screwed. You may have a max of 1.5kb download, but is there any sort of a CIR on the line? [what's the speed that they'll guarantee you to get? I'm guessing, nothing, as it's not in your contract with them].
Take the example of the ISP that I used to work for [before they started doing DSL]. We had somewhere near 200 modems per T1. With all 200 people using a 56k modem at the same time, that'd be over 10mb...but a T1's only 1.5mb. In our case you could always assume a certain amount of slack on the lines -- even when a person's connected up, it's not working full tilt, or it's doing something local, like downloading e-mail.
Most ISPs have something to the effect of requiring 'interactive' sessions or something similar, to keep you from sucking down the bandwidth with servers or bots. If you wanted to run a server, upgrade your plan, and get a business plan, or dedicated dial-up, or something similar.
People who try to get stuff for free, and take the ISPs for a ride are the reason that the market crapped out. You have a contract of service with your ISP. If you are using services which are specifically denied by your AUP, you are stealing services from them. It's no different than going to a store and lifting something. Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean that it should be done.
Oh...and all ISPs should just be banning all incoming traffic on known ports if they have any hopes of staying alive.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Is there a definitive list of known class A/B addresses? It would be interesting to see who is hoarding numbers, and how long they've been held. Not that some people shouldn't have rights to those numbers.
I always thought that IP addresses were organized by some sort of area-cluster format. I guess not, though. It's too bad, it would be cool if you could determine most clients' area by their IP address, although this would also likely end up with people being more easily block by IP mask.
No, that's a standard assload. A metric assload would be 1.016 times your standard assload, or in this case, 7.27 libraries of congress.
The US has successfully negotiated its soldiers out of coverage by the International Court at the Hague.