Vint Cerf: 'The Internet Is For Everyone' 163
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."
hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, we all do, so let's ignore the problem.
Tea anyone?
Hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Users as consumers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: What do we do when.... (Score:2, Insightful)
On a related note, the percentage of IPv4-adresses assigned to American (US) organisations, businesses, people is unproportionally high.
That 's why the European Union is trying to push Cisco et al to implement IPv6 faster then originally planned.
[Off-topic: I don't know what happened to IPv5. Maybe they follow kernel-numbering guidelines: odd numbers are for experimental use, even numbers for stable standards.]
Re:Free as in Speech (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:1000 million? (Score:2, Insightful)
Internet for the wealthy, by the rest of us ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:SpringTime (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Users as consumers? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you'd chosen Usenet or some of the IRC networks as examples, I would have agreed. Centrally administered services can hardly keep the spirit of the earlier days, but truely distributed services can do, if they supported by many companies and individuals, not only by providing content, but also by offering infrastructure.
Everyone means simple technologies (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: What do we do when.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Yes. Most users *are* consumers. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
End-To-End Transparency (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
Re:Free as in Speech (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course there's a problem of shifting through the garbage that bombards your senses. I deal with that problem every time I go to a library, or step outside in a city, or turn on the television set. In some ways, I find that the 'net is better at allowing me to filter out the crap than paper-based information sources. And I'm not just talking about google's ability to thwart pages' attempts to up their ratings, but also that if you truly want you can only visit a few websites and not deal with anything else.