[lac-discuss-en] Fwd: [At-Large] WWW III.0
Carlton Samuels
carlton.samuels at gmail.com
Tue Aug 21 17:02:28 UTC 2012
Here's something worthy of your reflection....and engagement.
- Carlton
==============================
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: JFC Morfin <jefsey at jefsey.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:54 AM
Subject: [At-Large] WWW III.0
To: NCSG-DISCUSS at listserv.syr.edu, governance at lists.igcaucus.org, At-Large
Worldwide <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org>
Cc: Discussion for At-Large Europe <euro-discuss at atlarge-lists.icann.org>
Dar folks,
I am surprised and somewhat dismayed that no one in "Civil Society"
and @LARGEs seems interested and that no one is discussing the
"W.W.W. 3.0" episode that is now developing. I name WWW 3.0 as the
Whole World War at the "3.0" level that concerns us all. This episode
is the attempt of the commercial funding (and not the ITU) to take
over ultimate control of international standardization's future
throughout and through the Internet standardization process
(IAB/IETF/ISOC), reversing its documented position in RFC 3869 and
3935 and hijacking innovation trends (the "3.0" coming layers).
1. Why do I talk of "commercial funding"?
Because the IAB warned us of the danger that we are facing and
explained how to avoid it in RFC 3869 (Aug. 2004) and neither
Governments, nor Civil Society or International Organizations, did
anything about it. Only a small kernel of us tried to do something.
In Aug. 2004, the IAB stated: "The principal thesis of this document
is that if commercial funding is the main source of funding for
future Internet research, the future of the Internet infrastructure
could be in trouble. In addition to issues about which projects are
funded, the funding source can also affect the content of the
research, for example, towards or against the development of open
standards, or taking varying degrees of care about the effect of the
developed protocols on the other traffic on the Internet."
This resulted from "the reduced U.S. Government funding and
profit-focused, low-risk, short-term industry funding has been a
decline in higher-risk but more innovative research activities.
Industry has also been less interested in research to evolve the
overall Internet architecture, because such work does not translate
into a competitive advantage for the firm funding such work."
Therefore, IAB believed "that it would be helpful for governments and
other non-commercial sponsors to increase their funding of both basic
research and applied research relating to the Internet, and to
sustain these funding levels going forward."
* In Tunis the world's Governments left the US Government to
take care of the Legacy Internet and did not get themselves involved
in the emergence of any architectural research.
* The IETF did not participate in the WSIS nor get involved in the IGF.
* Civil society non-commercial sponsors or helpers did not join
our successful efforts (so far) at the IETF:
* To protect languages and cultures from engineering and
business control.
* Introduce a civil society technical place at the IETF (the
Internet Users Contributing Group)
* To obtain the validation of an Intelligent Use (IUse)
Interface (IUI) concepts.
* We feel alone in creating the Intelligent Use Task Force
(IUTF) to explore, document, validate, and deploy the people centric
capacity demanded by the WSIS.
2. Why do I use "3.0"?
This is because in a nutshell if "2.0" has now an accepted meaning,
the 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 "notions" (i.e. all of what can relate to a
topic) can be perceived as:
* "1.0" meaning: server centric monologue, and related
* "2.0" meaning: network centric dialogue, and related
* and "3.0" meaning: people centric polylogue, and related.
So,
* "Master/Slave" initial Web connections are "1.0".
* Wikis, AJAX, WebSocket, etc. are "2.0".
* The Internet+, the IUI (intelligent use interface), Midori/Hurd
(the Microsoft's and Stallman's expected replacements for Windows and
Linux), etc. are "3.0."
Another "technical way" to understand this might be, in strict,
simple, and robust concordance with RFC 1958, which defines the
internet architecture, to say that:
* 1.0 builds atop "plug to plug" hardware,
* 2.0 builds atop "end to end" software,
* and 3.0 atop "fringe to fringe" middleware.
Two key points remain, however: what about "0.0" and "4.0" and
exactly what is "3.0"?
* "0.0" is everything that we do in order to communicate and
understand information without digital tools in mind and that is
generically called semiotics. "4.0" is what our brains do through
digital semiotics that we can call brainware.
* "3.0" is what RFC 1958 states that we must put at the fringe:
network intelligent services. It is only some plugged layers on the
user side (PLUS), extending the OSI communication model, along with
its administration and governance. The "OSEX" model extended layers concern:
* Security (and presentation in the Internet case).
* Network services.
* Interoperations between network applications and services
In the users' life, it should appear as personal distributed
middleware empowering browsers (in computers, mobiles, tablets,
appliances, TVs, houses, cars, etc.) with intelligent open services
that are free to choose their reference providers. One may understand
a person's IUI as an "intelligent socket" system acting as private
intelligent gateway network interfacing the OS of his/her machines
and appliances in such a way that it makes that person the center of
his/her freely selected worldwide digital ecosystem.
3. Why do I use "Whole"?
This is because we do not discuss the Web or even the sole Internet
any more. We discuss the whole digital ecosystem (WDE), i.e. all the
physical or logical parallel interconnections to anything digital by
our Intelligent Use Interface (IUI).
So, what is at stake is the whole digital ecosystem industrial
pollution (and corruption) and biased innovation. How?
Through market driven commercially sponsored international standards,
as was just explained by the IAB.
To understand why:
* a norm is the description of normality. Until now, norms were
local (for a country) or professional (for a trade, skill, or task).
* Norms, therefore, opposed globalization. This is why the trend
that is pushed by the commercial funding is to unify normality, i.e.
to shape the world as a unique market.
Hundreds of wars and revolutions have failed to attain that target
throughout history. Those who Richard Buckminster Fuller calls the
"Grand Pirates" (in his "Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth") found
a simpler way after WWI and WW II where they had lost control to
engineers (from submarines and planes to the atom and computers): to
recover control by using the common desire for international peace,
human rights, democracy, etc. and the resulting needs for a better
economy through a world market and rules.
These rules in technologies are "standards". They say how to
technically best build atop of norms. Therefore, they call for common
uniform norms, and at the same time the international standards
progressively shape a new "world normality" as, and for, a "common
world market".
This normality must be stable to protect market shares: as we know
they call this stability the "status quo".
Disruptive and fundamental innovations become a risk. TMs and
incremental innovation are tuned to keep consumers buying. However,
incremental innovation must be based upon international standards
protecting from a competitor's breakthrough and have to be coherently
ubiquitous to keep being accepted by the permanently reshaped customers
(us).
Industrial evolution is only permitted after amortization and only if
it increases benefits. However, this is not the lead-users' (FLOSS,
start-ups, user R&D, press) pace.
What the Web 2.0 already did to the Internet 1.0 has to be digested
and reshaped in a commercially favorable landscape of WebApps: this
is the task of the International Standardization and marketing consensuses.
The IDNA2008 consensus and its progressive propagation throughout the
protocol space (WG/Precis) shows the coming of the IUI 3.0 and of the
Internet+ (tested by Google+) – whatever you want to call that
Internet built-in trend – as ineluctable. The International Standards
bodies are to confuse and delay its concepts enough for it not to become:
* An identified, independent, and acknowledged middleware
standardization core area (IUTF)
* A people centric enhanced cooperation capacity for the
internet, social nets, telephone, radio, TV, digital music, e-books,
etc. polycratic stewardship.
Multistakeholderism must stay among commercial leaders, not to
extend to everyone, especially if Civil Society and ethitechnics
(ethical considerations in architectural design) are involved.
4. Why do I say "World"?
This is because this does not only concern the sole US market, or the
Western developed countries market, or even the emergent countries
(India, China, Russia, etc.), but rather everywhere. This results
from the WWWeb e-marketing field of competition. All is market driven
and the market is global. No one must be able to endanger the
commercial leaders' famous names and commercial rights anywhere in the
world.
The strategy for years has been called "internationalization":
offensive business protection through the spread of the commercial
leaders' industrial technology supported by:
* favorable commercial conditions
* correlative identical local standardization
* permitted mass production increases, now on a multinational basis.
A well known example is the Unicode consortium's (IBM, Microsoft,
Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Oracle...) successful technical "globalization":
* internationalization of the media (International English
capacity to quote any string in any script, which does not fully
support the languages that use the scripts), being the maintainer of
the ISO 10646 standard.
* localization (local translation) of the English semantic, which
does not support the various cultural semantics
* language tagging for technical, operational, commercial
non-neutral filtering purposes.
This globalization is not a multilingualization that would set out to
technically treat and culturally respect every language and its
orthotypography the same as English is treated.
4. Why do I say "War"?
Because of:
1. the TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) rules
The WTO rules do not permit a country to protect its people against a
technology (or a TLD, as we see with Saudi Arabia and GAC protests)
that is an international standard.
<http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/tbt_e/tbt_e.htm>
http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/tbt_e/tbt_e.htm.
This is why the ultimate weapon to fight States' Barriers to Trade is
to erode the credibility of their legitimate policy objectives, such as:
the requirements for quality,
the respect of cultures and minorities
the protection of human health and safety,
or the environment.
The war is then on the Governments and the slogan for the "market
forces" is to protect ... Human Rights (through free speech in using
international market standards, for example) against people's Governments.
One of the vectors is GNI
(<http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/>
http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/)
where Microsoft, Google etc. decide on the people's best interest and
defend their rights. This is far from democratically transparent
technical standardization and network neutrality. Certainly civil and
human rights are to be defended, but is it up to technical
standardization bodies to defend them? In confusing the issues
doesn't that harm the needed international standard technical
credibility and lead to political restrictions affecting the free
flow of information?
2. The competition on us, the users
We (technical and civil society people) represent a real danger for
industry leaders in being:
Uncontrollable international competition, potentially rogue, possible
divergent definition of what is a "better" Internet (in RFC 3935 IETF
Mission Statement).
Smart enough to introduce, propose, defend, and deploy more
innovative and people centric architectural solutions (i.e. for a
"3.0" information society that is "people centered, à caractère
humain, centrada en la persona").
In the same way as the financial crisis is resulting from financially
dominant people/entities (speculators and corporate interests), the
international standardization mechanics is to protect market driven
standardizing from lead users disrupting innovation.
5. The strategic impact.
This battle is now conducted at the ITU, IAB/IETF, IEEE, ISO,
Governments level.
This results in particular from the Dubai December meeting
(<http://world2012.itu.int/>http://world2012.itu.int/) that is to
revise the International Telecommunications Rules
(<http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/default.aspx>
http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/default.aspx).
In this debate, commercial leaders plan to oppose and negotiate with
States alone, since Civil Society is absent and users are represented
by their Governments.
In the Internet case, the IAB and IETF Chairs (the IAB Chair is a
Microsoft employee) have prepared a draft document putting the (now
ISOC affiliate) IETF in the commercial leaders' orbit.
Being the facilitator of the Civil Society IETF iucg at ietf.org mailing
list and one of the bootstrappers of the "3.0" IUTF (Intelligent Use
Task Force), I posed the question of us, the IUsers, of the
non-consulted IUCG channel and of our emergent IUTF standardization
pole and called for a WG/RFC3869bis (a WG dedicated to rewrite RFC 3869),
* To consensually adapt the description of the IAB/IETF position
regarding the standardization referents (market or people, commerce
or sustainable development), as we do not think that market and
commercial interests can develop without the support of the end-users.
* To document what the IETF means in its mission statement of
"influencing those who design, use, and manage the Internet for it to
work *better*" and to protect us against the RFC3869 IAB identified
threats of sole merchant sponsoring bias of the Internet R&D.
Our remarks have been acknowledged as part of the working file of the
IAB (Track #202). We also maintain an information portal on the
matter and our Civil Society Technical Rights in this area at
<http://iutf.org/wiki/Modern_Global_Standards_Paradigm>
http://iutf.org/wiki/Modern_Global_Standards_Paradigm.
The best place for debating and building up a Civil Society technical
position that can really help as part of the IETF standardization
process, at least to show that we actually feel concerned by the
"constitution of the Internet" (the source code as documented by Dr.
Lessig) is the non-WG (i.e. permanent)
<mailto:iucg at ietf.org>iucg at ietf.org mailing list and helping us with
the <http://iucg.org/wiki>http://iucg.org/wiki site.
6. A civil society ethitechnical doctrine
More generally, there is a need for Civil Society to have a technical
doctrine or at least mutually informed presence. The reason why is
that technology choices are not ethically neutral.
* As documented by the IAB RFC 3869, there are no technically
rooted influences. They are commercial in the current episode, but
they respond to (magnified) real political risks of influences. Civil
Society has to make sure that the people's best interest is the reference.
* Network neutrality is something difficult to enforce. The
easiest way to get it is to get the technology designed in such a way
that it is difficult or costly to not respect it (what is not the
case today, but that a "3.0" evolution helps in making it very
complex to filter the network).
* A multilinguistic internet (the cybernetic of all the languages
and cultures considered as equal on the common network) is to be
explored and discussed. This is a typical civil society concern and,
moreover, the real issue is our (we the people) relations to
mecalanguages, i.e. our own native languages as spoken by our
machines and in our anthtropobotic society ("on the internet, nobody
knows I am a dog" or a machine). We did start in France an effort in
that area, creating the MLTF, participating with MAAYA
(<http://maaya.org>http://maaya.org) and ITU, UNESCO, SIL, Union
Latine, Linguasphere, etc. This effort is to be resumed.
* The civil society has accepted a stewardship inherited from the
"1.0" legacy. Experience has been gained during the last decade
regarding the various forms of governance tools, stakeholders, etc.
common decision/trend processes, etc. while the 2.0 evolution and the
3.0 preparation will make several of them obsolete.
* One of the major concerns, since it is traditionally a main
part of the Internet Governance, is certainly the plain technological
deployment of the DNS, content centric networking, and the resulting
opportunities and evolutions in the understanding of the domain name
nature, use, economy, and impact on commercial, IPR, and societal usages.
To address these needs, a clear understanding of the very technical
nature of the Internet tool and of its cons and pros is necessary. We
cannot object to politics if they do not understand the internet
nature when they discuss SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, HADOPI, etc. legislations
and act as if we are actually no better than them.
The IUCG is certainly the best place to discuss and document the
Internet as a global and coherent system, under the control of
engineers, in a way that civil society and decision and lawmakers can
understand and master it.
Help would certainly be welcome, in every language that governments
and users use, as documented in ISO 3166.
The best way to join the IUCG and to help us (me) is at
<http://iucg.org/wiki/>http://iucg.org/wiki/
jfc
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