Internet/Web naivety? (Re: <nettime> Yahoo, the regulator)

[Toni Alatalo <antont@an.org>]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, geert lovink wrote:

> According to zdnet "Vinton Cerf of the United States, said at the time that he
> believed the move was contrary to the very idea of a World Wide Web, an
> electronic galaxy where information and ideas were exchanged with no physical
> borders." I really wonder if Cerf is that naive. He should know better that all
> Internet servers, in the end, have a locality. Data can move around, servers
> can't. Even if they could they remain to have a physical location and are
> thereby subject to the law of the place they are at that particular moment.

I wouldn't really be that surprised if that is what he genuinely thinks, and
perhaps what many other Internet enthusiasts have liked to think too.

Thinking of the Web, the actual servers do not matter, but the content, the
data. And that can be easily replicated, mirrored etc. even so, that the
physical location can not be determined (easily). To do this well has proven
increasingly difficult, but systems like Freedom.net from zeroknowledge have
addressed the problem interestingly. Also, the classic Usenet (perhaps irc to a
point too) obfuscates the locality, i.e. there the content is not tied to a
specific server (the content IDs work as pointers on any nntp server, like the
URN scheme is planned for use with the Web, instead of URLs as URIs)

The very same quote at hand from mr. Cerf indicates where his mind tends to
wonder - he thinks/speaks Star Trek (note the word "galaxy" there).  Internet
is the "global frontier" (the slogan of the Inet'97 conference in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia), like the space is the final frontier in Star Trek.

Of the genuine naivety vs. conspiracy theories issue, the question whether mr.
Cerf was actually pulling a trick on media or addressing (what he considered)
relevant issues regarding the Internet, reminds of what happened in Inet'98 in
Geneva. There the Internet Society was really facing difficult questions, like
furthering the by-then-debated IAHC-MoU (that lead to birth ICANN, or whatever
the relation was it was there) and other (self-)regulatory issues like content
(PICS was on the table I guess). Despite all that, all mr. Cerf brought up at
the press conference was the then recently announced project where they were
addressing the issues to do with the Interplanetary Internet - and the
journalist's bought that, so that all the magazines focused on the space stuff
in their Inet'98 reports. Which was fun, I guess. Mr. Cerf commented
afterwards, that he'd noticed me sitting there (in the press conference)
looking desparate, shaking my head (not believing how the journalists bought
it) but I don't remember asking/telling him what it was about.

Anyhow, what he says there might well be genuine. It might even be true.

> Why is the WWW constantly mixed up with the specific US-American juridiction of
> free speech? Well, there is a historical explanation for that (the Internet is
> an American invention etc.). But how long will that historical claim be valid?
> I think that what is at stake in this case of Yahoo! versus the French state.

This brought to mind another ISOC-related discussion, that Don Heath had with
some US-gov relad people (or something) - seems to me that he was not really
listened to, so despite what he was trying to say this was concluded:

---cut---

http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/science/hsy273140.000/hsy273140_0.htm
INTERNET DOMAIN NAMES, PART II
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1997
U.S. House of Representatives,
Committee on Science,
Subcommittee on Basic Research,
Washington, DC.

Chairman PICKERING. I would like to say, regardless of the legal questions in
this issue or this particular issue, I do think that there is a larger public
trust issue. American taxpayers have helped build the Internet as well as many
of the U.S. companies, and private sector investors. To now go into a
transition plan which would symbolically move that to another country,
off-shore, whether Switzerland or any other country, I think, will raise a
fundamental question among American taxpayers, the American public. This is
something that is uniquely American, that we have led on, and we need to
maintain that leadership to maintain, I believe, the registry in our country
and to do otherwise, I think, would be unfair to the American taxpayers and the
investors who have helped build this and made this great opportunity possible.
So, we may have�again, we want to get the right process but I do think that,
from members on this Committee, that part of the IAHC plan is not going to sell
very well, not here and not on Main Street and not anywhere that I can imagine. 

--cut---

siin�p� teille.

+ an +				~ Toni ~ 		: (t	.	!

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