Karl Auerbach — ICANN the USSR of the Internet

gnaremooz writes to tell us that The Register recently sat down with Karl Auerbach, the last publicly elected member of the ICANN board, and discussed some of the more recent developments. "Perhaps my main point of view regarding what I want to do for the net is expressed in my presentation [PPT] "From Barnstorming to Boeing - Transforming the Internet Into a Lifeline Utility" (speakers notes avilable [PDF]). I've long been interested in making the net a solid utility, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the folks who have to go out and fix things at 3am. I'm very interested in building tools for those folks."

Comments

Admirable goals

[zappepcs]

but as he points out in the PPT, manufacturers of end / edge devices are not holding up enough resources to participate in self healing networks. It might take near doubling the cost and development efforts to create edge / end user devices that can participate in such networks.

If its just at the backbone section of the Internet, can be done, but creating the library that allows your email application to know that the network is down, and to try sending via a relay server or some other relay method, takes a bit more effort and cooperation. Even if functions like this are only built into the OS networking (cable modem connection vs. wireless connection) redundancy and self healing get complex and expensive at the edge of the Internet cloud, and depend greatly on what the ISP will pass back to end users as to the condition of the network. The ISP part is where this will break down so that end users will still see the same Internet they have always seen. At least this will be true until ISP's are forced to play nicer.

How about the presentation in PDF or ODF?

[SgtChaireBourne]

Great, but in the interest of reaching the largest possible audience, how about posting at least an alternate copy of the presentation in a less insecure and more interoperable format like ODF or PDF. Both do presentations and since the main beef is about USSR-like control, using PDF or ODF would be putting money where the mouth is -- both are published, open standards.