Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence

[Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]>]

der Mouse wrote:
>>> The transition in which we gave up sender responsibility is long
>>> past, was quite protracted (roughly, I'd say, Sep 1993 through Oct
>>> 1998), and was largely unrecognized at the time (and thus the
>>> question of benefits gained in return did not arise).
>> Would you expand a little more on that, please?  I don't follow it.
> 
> I picked those months as the September that never ended for the
> beginning and Jon Postel's death for the end.
> 
> The former started the flood that turned the net from a responsible
> place populated (entirely, or close enough that that's an operation
> approximation) by people who shared a smooth-running net as a common
> goal into what we have today, where such people are an idealistic,
> tiny, and largely impotent minority.
> 
> The latter is as close as I've found to a watershed event for the
> transition from Internet governance with a well-run net as the primary
> motivation at the top of the pyramid to Internet governance with profit
> as the primary motivation at the top of the pyramid.  (Yes, I'm
> convinced the latter is basically what we have today.  I've heard of at
> least one TLD suggestion being turned down because the proposed rules
> for it wouldn't allow large numbers of domain registrations - which was
> actually the whole point, but because there wasn't a high-profit
> business model behind it it was rejected.  This also explains, though
> not excuses, the mismatch between authority and responsibility;
> offering authority without responsibility draws lots more customers.)

Thanks for sharing that.

We need to overcome that syndrome for something larger than just the 
Internet. The profit (greedy) model makes us blind, as it implies 
concentrating on short-term objectives rather than considering long 
term strategies.