Creating Tomorrow's Internet.
Welcome to the Internet Mark 2 Newsletter for October 2004.
The Internet Mark 2 Project rose out of concerns that Internet protocols and
governance have not evolved sufficiently to deal with the range of problems
which have appeared as the Internet gets older and bigger.
IN THIS ISSUE:
=> Feedback on the Internet Analysis Report 2004
=> Governance developments (including Geneva WGIG meeting, US senate hearings)
=> Protocol developments (including MARID, Lionshare and Planet-Lab updates)
=> Where to from here
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FEEDBACK ON THE INTERNET ANALYSIS REPORT - 2004
Our first activity has been a sponsored study of the current state of the
Internet, the Internet Analysis Report 2004 - Protocols and Governance. We
believe this report is a "must read" for all stakeholders in the future of the
Internet.
Thank you to everyone who has given us feedback on the report. We always knew
that it would be controversial in some quarters, but we also though it was
important that the facts were presented in plain language.
Our favourite quotes include:
"a good and informative paper"
"very clear and insightful"
"lays out its case in simple, understandable terms"
"finally someone has articulated a concise explanation of what it all means,"
"what I found valuable about it was the breadth of the approach, introducing
readers to a wide range of barriers that the Internet faces in increasing the
breadth and depth of its current coverage"
"I agree wholeheartedly that a more stable Internet is desirable and that
certain ancient protocols (e.g. SMTP) do not serve their purpose well enough any
more."
You can find out more about the report here.
Although the Executive Summary can be downloaded free of charge from
www.internetmark2.org, we do suggest that you purchase a full copy. In response
to requests, we have now instituted an academic price copy of the full report.
Bound copies are also available. These can be purchases via either credit card
or faxed purchase order.
Further details from
orders@internetmark2.org.
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GOVERNANCE DEVELOPMENTS
WSIS FORUM
The WSIS forum in Geneva on setting up a Working Group on Internet Governance
was held from September 20-21, 2004 and was, to all intents and purposes,
successful. Although much of the deliberations was about process, in his
summary, the Chairman noted:
=> Deliberations were more constructive than anticipated.
=> There was a general convergence of views on the need to treat Internet
governance from a broad perspective, taking into account what has been done
elsewhere and building on what already exists.
=> Topics that were particularly highlighted include the management of Internet
resources, network security, cyber-crime, spam, and multilingualism.
The Chairman (Mr. Nitin Desai, UN Secretary-General's Special Adviser to WSIS)
will report back to the Secretary-General, with a central message that the
Working Group on Internet Governance process will need to be open, transparent
and inclusive."
US SENATE HEARINGS
Meanwhile the US Government Senate hearings on September 30 2004 elicited the
following statements.
Ambassador Gross outlined the six guiding principles with respect to Internet
development being suggested by the United States.
These are to:
=> Promote an enabling environment through effective and efficient competition:
=> Recognize the roles of all stakeholders:
=> Support continued private sector leadership:
=> Avoid overly prescriptive or burdensome regulation:
=> Ensure the stability and security of networks:
=> Embrace the global, collaborative and cooperative nature of the network:
Perhaps more revealing was the testimony of Mr John Kneur, Deputy Assistant
Secretary, Communications and Information, National Telecommunications and
Information Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. Some of his more
interesting comments were:
"First, it has been suggested that the responsibility for DNS technical
management may shift to a UN agency as a result of WSIS. Let me take this
opportunity to clarify that neither the WSIS nor the subsidiary discussions
regarding Internet governance are chartered to take action or to yield an
international treaty with binding obligations. Rather, the WSIS is a forum for
discussions among interested parties that may yield proposals in the area of
Internet governance."
"Further, the Department does not believe that any existing UN body, such as the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) or the UN ICT Task Force, is
qualified to assume the responsibilities currently held by ICANN for the
technical coordination and management of the Internet domain name system."
"Given that the Internet is borderless and global in nature, the Department
recognizes that some Internet-related public policy issues may call for some
form of international cooperation to be effective (e.g., the need for
cooperation amongst enforcement authorities to combat spam). Broad international
Internet-related public policy issues, which may fall under the rubric of
Internet governance, are not within the mandate or the competencies of ICANN.
With this in mind, the Department will continue to work closely with the
international community and private sector and civil society stakeholders to
find appropriate solutions as situations warrant."
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PROTOCOL DEVELOPMENTS
Much of the Internet Analysis Report - 2004 is concerned with issues with the
ageing core Internet protocols, and the difficulties that current Internet
governance structures have in dealing with the larger issues involving in their
replacement.
UPDATE ON MARID
One of the report case studies deals with the Internet Engineering Task Force's
MARID working group, which was tasked with coming up with a sender
authentication scheme for email, which can help substantially in reducing email
fraud and many types of SPAM.
To quote from the Internet Analysis Report -.
"By early 2004, when it was obvious that major players such as Microsoft, Yahoo,
Sendmail and AOL were going to implement new standards with or without IETF
involvement, IETF convened its MARID Working Group to examine the problem. As a
result of participation from two of the major proponents, Microsoft with its
Caller-ID proposal and Meng Wong's SPF proposal, a merged proposal emerged
called Sender-ID.
However, Microsoft wished to retain certain rights to development work under
licence, while making it available to others. Thus, in addition to deciding on
technical issues, the work group was faced with some complex licensing
situations.
As this article was being written the complexities of this development were
being played out within the technical working group. But whatever the outcome
is, the issue is that IETF as a volunteer technical standards organization, has
neither the expertise nor in reality the scope to arbitrate on licensing and
intellectual property matters (or to make policy decisions in isolation on what
sort of licences should or should not be granted). This lack of expertise and
lack of structure to deal with issues such as this is a major structural flaw."
Now for an update.
Essentially, Microsoft issued wide-ranging defensive patent applications
covering many forms of email sender authentication and spam filtering, and
imposed license conditions on use which were unacceptable to major players such
as the Apache Foundation, whose software is used for perhaps the majority of
Internet servers around the world. Quite soon, the most common phrase in the
MARID working group as they struggled to deal with this became "IANAL", short
for "I am not a lawyer".
Amidst a great deal of disappointment from participants, IETF has decided to
close the MARID group because it could make no further progress. While the SPF
group and Microsoft will no doubt continue to develop partial spam solutions
without IETF involvement, an opportunity was lost here, not because of technical
issues, but because of legal concerns.
Engineers are not lawyers - to have to make legal decisions in an engineering
working group is hardly appropriate. That's not a criticism of the participants
and the way they handled the issue. It's a criticism of an inadequate structure.
This is so often the case with the Internet governance issues we are critical of
in the Internet Analysis Report - 2004. It's not the efforts of the current
players we are critical of, but the structures that lack avenues for high level
public policy input, and for escalating public policy issues to areas where
appropriate decisions can be made.
There's another lesson to learn from this, however. US patent laws on software
are being roundly criticised within the industry as stifling innovation. It's
been claimed that, under current laws, the Internet could never have been
developed, and may never be able to be improved. This is a non-technical issue
which impacts on technical development of the Internet; but, as it is a
non-technical issue, it appears to out of scope for current governance
structures. That's a dilemma that needs to be addressed.
We reiterate that spam is essentially a solvable problem, but only if a larger
scale approach is taken of replacing the core email protocol, SMTP. We are
encouraged by a growing body of opinion that this is so, but discouraged by the
lack of appropriate structure to tackle this issue.
INTEL AND PLANET LAB
On a more positive note, we were interested to see the comments of Intel Senior
Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger, who states that the
current Internet protocols have outlived their usefulness. Gelsinger is
harnessing support for the www.planet-lab.org initiative, which is looking at an
overlay approach to provision of new services.
LIONSHARE
Another positive development has come in the form of Lionshare software.
The LionShare project began as an experimental software development project at
Penn State University to assist faculty with digital file management. The
project has now grown to be a collaborative global effort.
LionShare builds on average peer-to-peer technology to include all the personal
file-sharing capabilities of Kazaa and Gnutella, plus adds the novel features of
authentication, access control, copyright protection, and permanent "continually
on" storage space. LionShare is unique in providing access to both centralized
databases of academic institutions and groups, and users' personal files with
only one search query More details can be found at http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main/
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Tell a friend
We continue to seek further feedback and exposure to the issues raised in the
report. If you are aware of someone who you think should be aware of these
issues, we suggest you send them this newsletter, and suggest they subscribe
(it's as simple as sending an email to subscribe@internetmark2.org.
Alternatively, direct them to www.internetmark2.org, where they can hunt around
for themselves.
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WHERE TO FROM HERE
Jay Fenello sent an interesting message where he compares current Internet
developments with the beginnings of the US constitution.
After drawing a number of historical parallels between US constitutional
development and Internet governance development, he concludes
"First, this is going to take a long time. It took our founding fathers over 11
years -- and at the rate we are going, it will likely take us the same
(especially if we continue to use the same face-to-face meeting process that
*they* used in the 1770's)
Second, this is an iterative process. We are going to make mistakes, many at
first. Welcome diversity, and learn from it.
Third, realize that there are going to be power plays, legal challenges,
governmental intervention, and all manner of other machinations. Expect it, and
call them as you see them.
Finally, be happy. These are exciting times, no matter how painful they seem
right now!"
Please continue to send feedback, and expressions of interest and involvement.
We do not imagine we are the only player or even a major player as this develops
further; we see our role as working with others and being a catalyst for
effective change.
Opinions on future direction for the Internet protocols differ widely at this
stage, from small centralised systems to widely distributed peer to peer
systems.
Internet pioneer Bob Frankston was one person who went to lengths to explain his
opinions on this, as follows:
"In the meantime I've taken the attitude that it's far simpler to just pave over
the Internet than to fix it. It's the same as it was when the Internet simply
paved over the phone network using it only as a transport.
I very much agree that IP is broken because it is too smart.....The current
Internet is a wonderful prototype that's simply way beyond its design point.
The first step is to separate naming from routing - the IP address tries to do
both and mix in crypto-capabilities. Stay tuned.
The good news is that P2P (peer to peer) efforts are End-to-End despite, not
because of, the Internet. Skype is a great example.
My current goal is to make it easy to create end-to-end applications that use
the current Internet as an optional route and not a layer. After all, a
dependency on an Internet layer would violate the end-to-end principle and thus
a smarter Internet is a contradiction in terms."
That's one theory, but, as another correspondent put it
"Our rustynet is outdated: end to end is so silly. Relations are brain and
brain. Brains interoperability is the real need."
From our point of view, let the debate continue. What's important is that we
begin to think now about how we will go about the creation of a new Internet
infrastructure.
We will continue to bring attention to this problem, and to the fact that
current structures seem unable to come up with answers.
But within the range of people who are reading this newsletter, we know there
are answers and approaches and the will to solve these. The only option we rule
out at this stage is the "do nothing" one.
Send us your feedback via
newsletter@internetmark2.org. We'd love to hear from you!
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This newsletter was sponsored by
Ian Peter and Associates Pty
Ltd. Ian Peter and Associates provide a range of strategy, policy, analysis
and project management services. For further information contact ian.peter@ianpeter.com.
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