nettime: name.war.begins.on.net.not

[t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

At 4:47 AM -0500 on 12/5/96, Paul Garrin wrote:


> <B>name.war.begins.on.net.</B>
 <...>
> After eating my take-out food, with my lawyer on the
> phone, I recorded the "hotseat" confrontation via telephone
> with an adversary from WIRED's camp, named "Simpson", someone
> with purportedly some degree of technical knowledge, and a
> bizarre fixation on the details about how the internet came
> to be, and the personalities involved in forming it under the
> umbrella of the US Department of Defense.
 <...>

        Five bucks says it was Simson Garfinkel, who, among other things,
wrote O'Reilly books such as _PGP_ and (with Spafford) _Practical UNIX
Security_.
        I'm curious to hear your exchange with him, but WRT his "bizarre
fixation," please remember that in your "Expanding the Internet Namespace"
press release (?) you talked about about SAIC being CIAs spelled backwards,
and one of the name.space web pages refers to "some shady company
investigat[ing] who you are and what you are doing on the net."

> I'll keep you posted.

        Please be a bit measured about it. Stunts like this are all but
certain to generate some legal smoke--and, by your own account, a whole two
cranky calls merited three mentions of your lawyer. (So is the formula x+1
or x*150%?)
        If you get a chance, can you maybe sometime cobble together some
explanation for us (rhetoric about the "free market," "client demand,"
"democracy," etc. aside), about:

        - how name.space differs from the NIC and/or Alternic? You're charging
          an annual fee, hoping to make a buck, acknowledging copyrights, and
          so on.

        - how your press release and Rushkoff's "NYT Wire Service article use
          verbatim language? Who's criibbing off who?

        - how name.space amounts to more than subnet name games on a WAN? If
          the Big Boys of the router world decided to pull the DNS plug on the
          name.space nameservers, name.space would be dead in the water, no?


Cheers,
Ted


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