Re: [ALSC-Forum] A query

[Karl Auerbach]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Vittorio Bertola wrote:

> >"Powerful corporate interests" are precisely the entities that paid for
> >the current Internet...

> Now, even if single parts of the Internet are private and for-profit,
> there's no doubt in my view that the Internet itself, as an instrument of
> communication, socialization and commerce, should not be managed towards the
> biggest possible commercial profit for any of those owning parts of it, but
> towards the biggest possible advantage to the collectivity.

A couple of points:

First, the history that the Internet was "built" by big corporate
interests is false.  The very early Internet came largely out of the US
military working with universities and some of the smaller
research/aerospace companies.  When I first encountered the Internet it
was UCLA, Lincoln Labs (MIT) and one other node (I forgot which).  The
companies involved were BBN, Mitre, SDC (where I worked), Rand and others
of that ilk.  The larger companies involved - Univac, GE, AT&T, Honeywell,
IBM, were contactors who were paid for things like leased lines or special
purpose computers (such as the Honeywell 516 used for the first IMPs.)
Some of these larger companies published papers that dismissed the
Internet as having any potential.

Some of the "big" companies on the net today didn't even then exist - many
of them - Cisco, UUNET, Apple, Sun, Microsoft - grew on the PC and
Internet wave.  (Some, like Xerox, GE, Honeywell, Proteon, managed to miss
the those waves.)

There are many who had major roles in the net - for example Donald Davies,
Jerry Saltzer, and Dave Clark - remained in acadamia or research.

What does this show?  Simply that the net is the creation of many hands in
many countries, not merely investments from large corporations; so
regulatory control of the net should not be blindly handed over to them in
some sort of exercise of historical revisionism.

----

Second, even if there is major private investment in the net - and there
is no doubt that today most of the infrastructure is private - that fact
is no reason to say that the net should be immune from public regulation.
Let's look at airlines - those are largely held by private interests, yet
air travel and airplanes are very highly regulated.

One can see the same thing elsewhere - private enterprises regulated by
the public - in banking, medicine, telephony, automobiles, etc.

So, again asking: What does this show?  It shows that the private
ownership is not a shield against public regulation.

----

Third, what is to be the vehicle to perform this Millsian goal of managing
the internet for the highest collective good?  Should it be a single
entity like ICANN trying to do some sort of central planning (i.e. five
year plans? ;-), or should it be done in a more distributed fashion?

		--karl--