Re: [irtf-discuss] [Internet Policy] Why the World Must Resist Calls to Undermine the Internet

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

The OP gets a lot of the history wrong. But I don't think the established
history is entirely correct either. It is a history given from a particular
point of view which is not the only relevant point of view.

The view from outside was never quite the same as the view from inside. And
the US version of how the Internet was won tends to sound rather too much
like white men bringing their benevolent gifts. The implication being that
if the Internet is a gift of the US of A, it is only right and proper that
the vision of the founders determine its future in perpetuity.

My view of what happened is rather different. Basically, the Internet
succeeded because it was the only technical proposal on the table that met
the necessary conditions for becoming a global network. And the first and
most important of those was local autonomy. So local autonomy was not a
gift, it was a necessary condition for success.

If we were to explore the counterfactual in which (D)ARPA did not fund
Internet development, that might have affected the timing but
AOL/CompuServe/MSN would have still faced the same fact that an open
communication system will grow faster than closed and no government was
going to allow a foreign company to establish a monopoly of email.


We are currently engaged in what some are starting to call 'The Great
Information War'. Had Putin's crew managed to succeed in their attempted
coup on 2021/6/1, Trump would have disbanded NATO before the invasion of
Ukraine. Fascism would have returned to Europe and likely have arrived in
the US as well.

The Internet was always at the center of the Great Information War. But it
wasn't Trump's tweets that reached a national audience, it was the
willingness of the establishment media to repeat them. And not just Fox
News, but CNN, the NYT and Washington Post.

Some people are asking how the Internet can be used to win the Great
Information War. But that is to miss the real point which is how we stop
the next fighting war breaking out.


How we got to where we are is relevant only insofar as it informs our
efforts to get to where we need to be.

Telling falsehoods is a limited technique for controlling public opinion.
In the 1920s the press barons discovered that they could control public
opinion by setting the agenda, by choosing what issues were news. The civil
rights movement finally succeeded 40 years later because it was able to
successfully challenge the ability of the press to set the agenda.

Today it is not the 'centralization' of the Web that is the real issue, it
is the fact that a handful of individuals control the voting shares in the
companies that set the agenda through curation of the dominant social media
feeds. That is the power that must be challenged if the Internet is going
to fulfill its promise as a technology of freedom.



On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 8:00 AM vinton cerf <[e-mail]> wrote:

> 1. Arpanet was never called "Darpanet"
> 2. I don't think we ever "numbered" users since getting on the Arpanet was
> mostly by having an account on a time-sharing computer at a university (or
> research lab) that had an ARPA contract.
> 3. "bangs" were at email level, not Arpanet (or Internet) level of
> routing. The "bang" email addresses aided routing through application level
> gateways.
> 4. Bob Kahn, Dave Walden, Frank Heart and many others at BBN did the
> Arpanet IMP design. The Arpanet Host-Host NCP effort was led by Steve
> Crocker (Jon Postel and I and others helped) and stabilized enough to
> support email in 1971 and a public demonstration in October 1972. The
> Internet work started the next year in 1973. Since Internet was conceived
> as a network of networks, you needed more than one network to make an
> Internet. There were three to begin with: Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and
> Packet Satellite Net, all funded by ARPA.
>
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 4:50 AM David Lloyd-Jones via InternetPolicy <
> [e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Willi,
>>
>> You have shown us that you are full of good sentiments. Quite a lot of
>> them. Very good ones. I assume that you know something about the start and
>> development of the Internet but no such knowledge has found its way into
>> your long post.
>> .
>> First proposed by Bacon in the fifteenth century or so, the 'Net was a
>> solid policy proposal made by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It was made possible
>> by the invention of packet-switching in the mid-1960 to 70s. Johnny Foster,
>> JFK's science advisor in 1961, was the first person I know of to have done
>> solid financing of the effort.  Bush was working on wide-scale computer
>> networking, along with many other things, when I met him in his
>> utterly false "retirement" in Lexington, Mass. in 1976. This was well
>> before your Reagan Administration.
>>
>> The original present "internet" was ARPAnet  (on which I was user #300 in
>> 1971). This was financed before it really existed by ARPA when that
>> "Agency" was more-or-less a slush fund passed around at random in the
>> Pentagon. It continued as DARPAnet after they added that "D," for defence,
>> to pretend compliance with the Mansfield Amendment. I worked on this on
>> Congressional staff in 1969-71 and at MIT in '72. The D was tacked on in
>> December '71 or January '72, I forget, but had been in the works ever since
>> Mansfied, as Senator, had tried to prevent military money from corrupting
>> civilian research. Unfortunately, civilian researchers cried piteously that
>> they wanted to be corrupted. By then, Mansfied was ambassador to Japan....
>>
>> When the scalability of the internetted nets, DARPAnet, began to seem
>> limited, -- all those !!! "bangs," -- its growth was smoothed by the
>> development of the present TCP/IP, credited to Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf. When
>> Cerf later went to work for MCI, a hapless little phone company, their PR
>> department tub-thumped that he was "the" founder of "the" Internet. Many
>> people seem to have believed this inanity. More recently this has been
>> toned down to "a" founder of the Internet. In fact packet-switching, the
>> key invention, was largely the work of Lenny Kleinrock, under whom Cerf
>> studied as a university student. Their much later contribution to TCP/IP
>> has certainly been useful.
>>
>> On Fri, 11 Mar 2022 at 13:07, willi uebelherr via InternetPolicy <
>> [e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Why the World Must Resist Calls to Undermine the Internet
>>> Andrew Sullivan, 02.03.2022
>>>
>>> https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/03/why-the-world-must-resist-calls-to-undermine-the-internet/
>>>
>>> Dear friends,
>>>
>>> Andrew Sullivan rightly pointed out in his text that "the Internet is
>>> for everyone". Absolutely right in the idea.
>>>
>>> But the reality is different. The technical players acting today are not
>>> interested in a free global communication of people, but in a
>>> commercialization and capitalization of their needs for communication.
>>>
>>> This result did not come about by chance, but was already the essential
>>> guiding principle at the beginning by the government of the USA under
>>> Ronald Reagan. The original concept of "the inter-connection of local
>>> Net-works", which is necessarily based on local networks, became a
>>> privately and state organized system of interconnected star-systems,
>>> "the inter-connection of private Star-Systems".
>>>
>>> This interconnection of star-systems creates the possibility to organize
>>> access and exclusion according to arbitrary criteria. And we see today
>>> that the system of a free global communication has turned into a field
>>> of censorship and private control mania, organized by countries calling
>>> themselves "the West". Already the naming points to organized bullshit,
>>> because the planet is a sphere and not a disk and thus any directions
>>> can lead to the same goal.
>>>
>>> The actors of this fragmentation and breaking of a free human
>>> communication "without borders" are those who call themselves
>>> representatives of a "free world", but in fact trample every diversity
>>> with military boots. Every form of racial mania a'la Cecil Rhodes is put
>>> back on the table. Lying and hypocrisy is the form of communication that
>>> is now elevated to the absolute.
>>>
>>> The idea of telecommunication in the form of an Internet that does not
>>> adhere to private or governmental or geographical boundaries, as we saw
>>> with Jonathan Postel, was destroyed at the very beginning of the life of
>>> an Internet. Today we see what a monster of small-minded power madness
>>> it has developed into, where only private profit interests and state
>>> delusions of control apply.
>>>
>>> The alternative always remains. A telecommunication in the form of an
>>> internet, which rests on local networks and thus enables free access to
>>> all people of our planet, independent of their social situation and
>>> geographical position.
>>>
>>> That and only that is a "net of nets".
>>>
>>> with kind regards, willi
>>> Asuncion, Paraguay
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> in german -----------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> Liebe freunde,
>>>
>>> Andrew Sullivan hat zu Recht in seinem Text darauf hingewiesen, "the
>>> Internet is for everyone". Absolut richtig in der Idee.
>>>
>>> Aber die Wirklichkeit sieht anders aus. Die heute agierenden technischen
>>> Akteure sind nicht an einer freien globalen Kommunikation der Menschen
>>> interessiert, sondern an einer Kommerzialisierung und Kapitalisierung
>>> ihrer Beduerfnisse nach Kommunikation.
>>>
>>> Dieses Resultat ist nicht zufaellig entstanden, sondern war bereits zu
>>> Anfang das wesentliche Leitmotiv durch die Regierung der USA unter
>>> Ronald Reagan. Das urspruengliche Konzept "the Inter-connection of local
>>> Net-works", das ja notwendig auf lokalen Netzwerken ruht, wurde zu einem
>>> privat und staatlich organisierten System von verbundenen Sternsystemen,
>>> "the inter-connection of private Star-Systems".
>>>
>>> Diese Verbindung von Stern-Systemen schafft die Moeglichkeit, nach
>>> beliebigsten Kriterien den Zugang und Ausschluss zu organisieren. Und
>>> wir sehen heute, dass sich das System einer freien globalen
>>> Kommunikation zu einem Feld der Zensur und privatem Kontrollwahn
>>> entwickelt hat, das von Laendern organisiert wird, die sich "der Westen"
>>> nennen. Schon die Namensgebung deutet auf organisierten Schwachsinn,
>>> weil der Planet eine Kugel und keine Scheibe ist und damit beliebige
>>> Richtungen zum gleichen Ziel fuehren koennen.
>>>
>>> Die Akteure dieser Zersplitterung und Zerbrechung einer freien
>>> menschlichen Kommunikation "ohne Grenzen" sind jene, die sich als
>>> Vertreter einer "freien Welt" bezeichnen, tatsaechlich aber jede
>>> Diversitaet mit militaerischen Stiefeln zertrampeln. Jede Form des
>>> Rassenwahns a'la Cecil Rhodes wird wieder auf den Tisch gestellt. Die
>>> Luege und Heuchelei ist diejenige Form der Kommunikation, die nun zum
>>> absoluten Mass erhoben wird.
>>>
>>> Die Idee einer Telekommunikation in Form eines Internet, das sich nicht
>>> an private oder staatliche oder geografische Grenzen haelt, wie wir es
>>> bei Jonathan Postel sahen, wurde schon zu Beginn der Lebensphase eines
>>> Internet zerstoert. Heute sehen wir, zu welchem Monster kleingeistigem
>>> Machtwahns es sich entwickelt hat, wo nur noch private Profitinteressen
>>> und staatlicher Kontrollwahn gelten.
>>>
>>> Die Alternative bleibt immer existent. Eine Telekommunikation in Form
>>> eines internet, das auf lokalen Netzwerken ruht und so allen Menschen
>>> unseres Planeten den freien Zugang ermoeglicht, unabhaengig von ihrer
>>> sozialen Lage und geografischen Position.
>>>
>>> Das und nur das ist ein "Netz der Netze".
>>>
>>> mit lieben gruessen, willi
>>> Asuncion, Paraguay
>>>
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>