more on Gee, when did we give away the Internet?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 14:48:40 -0500
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Gee, when did we give away the Internet?
X-Sender: mail.reed.com:dpreed@127.0.0.1
To: Andy Oram <andyo () oreilly com>, dave () farber net

Andy - it's hardly surprising that the "news" organizations look for a 
centralized organization to be the "owner" of everything.

The concept that we as people can collectively hold any power in a 
decentralized way was a brilliant American idea in the 18th century, and 
became a hollow slogan.  After all, gossiping about the king and 
personified challengers to his power is much more compelling than 
attempting to sort out the issues that are negotiated among groups.

Thus, power flows back to the center, if the people accept the center, its 
personification and so forth.

Meanwhile, keep "overlay" inter-networks alive and well, by using them and 
paying for them.  The Internet will always live on as a loose aggregation 
of overlays, especially if we maintain a layer of gateways that provide a 
universal overlay address space, with end-to-end encryption and authentication.

Those tools are necessary and sufficient for routing around any 
centralization-caused damage.

It may be that we need to deploy steganography if the governments decide to 
block based on content-type.   But steganography is easy.

Let them have the name "Internet", but keep the real INTER(operable) net alive.

When I'm feeling deeply paranoid, which is rarely, I worry that it may 
become a criminal offense to interconnect networks in some countries.   The 
US seems the most likely place for this to happen, oddly enough.  But 
offshore interconnect is getting easier and easier...


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