[IP] more on Gee, when did we give away the Internet?
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 14:48:40 -0500
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] Gee, when did we give away the Internet?
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To: Andy Oram <andyo@xxxxxxxxxxx>, dave@xxxxxxxxxx
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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