Report from INET98 and IFWP-Geneva (fwd)

[Marloth _at__ t-online.de (Heinz Marloth)]

Liebe KollegInnen,
den folgenden bericht von jay hauben gebe ich gerne an sie weiter:

> Report From INET98 and IFWP-Geneva
> by Jay Hauben,  jrh _at__ ais.org
>  
> >From July 20 to 24, INET98, the eighth annual conference of the
> Internet Society (ISOC), was held in Geneva, Switzerland. It was
> followed on July 24 and 25 by a meeting of the International
> Forum on the White Paper (IFWP).
> The Internet Society was formed in 1992 "to facilitate and
> support the technical evolution of the Internet as a research and
> education infrastructure" (Charter of Internet Society, 2A). It
> has grown with the Internet and still today there is an
> increasing number of ISOC chapters being formed continually
> throughout the world. Even though the current Internet Society 
> leadership is most concerned with the efforts to commercialize
> and privatize the Internet, there were many attendees at INET98 
> especially from developing countries and international bodies 
> who defended the value of continuing the public Internet. At the 
> Developing Countries Seminar that preceded the main INET98 sessions, 
> frequent comments were made explaining the need for the involvement 
> of public bodies if the Internet is to spread more universally. One
> argument was that poor urban and rural people anywhere in the
> world can not be Internet customers. However they would benefit
> from and contribute to the Internet as a communications medium
> and the Internet could better integrate them into the rest of
> the world. 
> Historically, the vision of the "library of the future" has been 
> a constructive force contributing to the development of network 
> technology and the Internet. Surprisingly, the world library 
> community seemed sparsely represented at INET98. For example, 
> there were education and health tracks but no track or sessions 
> directly addressing the concerns and contributions of libraries 
> and librarians to Internet development. The importance of the 
> Internet to libraries was stressed however by a library person I 
> met at the conference from Benin, a country in West Africa. He 
> explained that the university library, one of the largest in his 
> country possesses only 23,000 books and 340 periodicals. He made 
> it clear how important Internet access to digitalized books and 
> journals can be to students and scholars in his country. He also 
> spoke about regional isolation in Benin and the value of email as 
> part of a solution to the communications problems between regions. 
>  
> There were eight parallel tracts at the conference in addition to
> the daily plenary sessions. The tracks were: 
> 1. New Applications, 
> 2. Social, Legal and Regulatory Policies, 
> 3. Commerce and Finance, 
> 4. Teaching and Learning, 
> 5. Globalization and Regional Implications,
> 6. Network Technology and Engineering,
> 7. User-Centered Issues, and
> 8. Health. 

> However, there were no tracks on major public questions 
> like Universal Access, or Community Networks, Freenets and Civic Nets, 
> or Internet and Democratization, or on the history of the Internet. 
> Also, there was no track or discussion on the pros and cons or issues 
> involved in the proposed privatization of the root server and domain 
> name systems.
> One session of the User-Centered Issues track was devoted 
> to Internet use by people with disabilities. The presentations were 
> almost exclusively arguments and appeals that web pages be constructed 
> with great care. Columnar or crowded web pages or those relying heavily 
> on graphics or illustrations are difficult or impossible to access
> for people using special readers. For example, page scanners used
> by people with limited or no sight read a whole single line
> sequentially even when the page is in columns. Also, many current
> web pages are especially confusing to people who have learning
> disabilities. The speakers urged web page creators to view their
> pages with a lynx text browser or emulator since many people in
> the world can only access the world wide web via a text browser.
> Also sometimes the use of page scanners and other special
> equipment is only possible with text browsers. Finally, not only
> in the discussion of access for people with disabilities but
> elsewhere in the conference a criticism of frames was made. The
> use of frames it was pointed out sometimes excludes access from
> older equipment but also does not allow accuracy of bookmarking
> or ease of printing defeating some of the value of the web. 
>  
> A technical session on "Quality of Service" covered differentiated
> service. Current routers are not yet but can be programmed to queue
> arriving packets according to classes of service. Depending for example on
> how much a sender pays, his or her packets could be given priority over
> the packets of lower paying senders. This new scheme would allow high
> bandwidth applications priority treatment while email or library search
> packets would be queued for later transmission or retransmission.  The
> lower paying users might experience greater delays but real time audio or
> video might be more successful. Supporters of such differentiated service
> admitted that the creation of classes of messages is contrary to the
> history and technology of the Internet which up until now has been
> egalitarian, but they argued that the technology allows for classes and
> there are companies that feel they can find customers who will pay higher
> charges to get higher priority. Such an important change it would appear
> should not be undertaken without hearing from the whole spectrum of users
> and future users nor could it be implemented without the consent of most
> networks which interconnect to make up the Internet. The question remained
> how would such a change get decided and would it only be possible via
> coercion.
> A number of sessions discussed the Internet II project of which
> Columbia University is a member. Over 130 academic and non-
> academic organizations have joined together to develop a new
> network that would achieve speeds or bandwidth up to 1000 times
> that of the current Internet. Academic institutions can join the
> Internet II consortium for a contribution between $500,000 and
> $2,000,000 which severely limits participation to the better
> endowed institutions. Commercial entities can join for a
> contribution of $25,000 usually in kind. The purpose of the
> Internet II project is to insure that educational and research
> users would still have a network even if the current trend toward
> commercialization and privatization of the Internet might
> marginalize their access to the current Internet. The strategy is
> to connect the consortium members with their own network not
> compatible with the Internet and then win the rest of the world
> over to their protocols. However this bifurcation of the Internet
> may not be easily repairable. Email and chat and other common
> uses of the Internet would stay on Internet I until Internet II
> protocols were adopted by everyone which also limits the value of
> Internet II. 
> The University of Geneva provided logistical support for INET98. 
> Its Computer Department setup and maintained 250 networked
> computers at the conference. Using a chip developed at the
> University, all the computers could boot several operating
> systems such as Windows95 and Linux while being protected against
> viruses and previous user activity. The chip allows sending pre-
> boot user preferences to the server including the choice to
> delete all data from the hard drive and load a mirror of the
> chosen operating system and environment from the server. All this
> would only be an exercise except that the developers created a
> compression scheme that greatly shortens the time to reload a
> computer from scratch. The chip seemed to work well and the
> computers at the conference were always in use if mostly for
> email and web searches. 
> Despite the rather narrow session topics, the great success of
> INET98 was the gathering of people from all over the world with
> overlapping interests in the Internet and its future. Many people
> were disappointed in the level of the presentations, their lack
> of historical perspective or technical depth. But there was a
> tremendous exchange of business cards and email addresses and a
> sense that the Internet was creating a world community and
> spreading a new communications technology that could help inter-
> connect the peoples of the world if the communications essence of
> the Internet were to continue and spread.
> The International Forum on the White Paper one and a half day
> meeting was not a planned extension of INET98 but a last minute
> event. The US government has had oversight and control of the
> domain name and root server systems that allow all users on the
> Internet to send messages and packets to each other no matter
> where they are. This is achieved via a conversion of domain name
> addresses into numeric addresses. The US government has confirmed
> its intention in a White Paper issued June 5, to end this
> historic role on September 30 of this year. The White Paper
> presented by presidential advisor Ira Magaziner has as its
> purpose the formation of a new private entity to control and
> manage the root server and domain name systems which are the
> central control and nerve center of the Internet. The IFWP
> meeting in Geneva was organized to approve and help give
> international support and form to the new private organization.
> The method to achieve such support was to disallow any opposition
> to privatization. The sessions were chaired in such a way that
> all opposition and most discussion was discouraged and there were
> frequent calls for consensus. Even when it appeared as many as
> half or more people were confused or openly opposed to proposed
> structures or powers of the new body the chairs often declared
> that consensus had been achieved and that the next issue was in
> order. Since the changes being proposed concern the future of the
> Internet, eg, whether it would be the interconnection of
> different networks or of only networks adhering to commercial
> concerns about security, they require careful consideration and
> the hearing of points of view from across the Internet user
> spectrum. But the IFWP meeting was not set up to allow such
> democratic procedure. The meeting ended with the declaration by
> the organizers that a large degree of consensus had been
> achieved. Those who opposed or disagreed with the process or the
> purpose of privatization of the nerve center of the Internet left
> the meeting very frustrated. Another such meeting is planned by
> the IFWP for Singapore in mid August while other follow up
> meetings and activities were planned by other forces. The value
> of these IFWP meetings are that they have alerted a body of
> people to significant changes that are being planned for the
> Internet. 
> More discussion on the proposed privatization of the domain name and root
> server systems of the Internet can be seen in the Amateur Computerist
> July 1998 Supplement, "Controversy Over the Internet" available at 
> http://www.columbia.edu/~jrh29/acn/dns-supplement.txt   and
> http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/dns-supplement.txt 
> and by email from jrh _at__ ais.org   Comments are welcomed.

mfg   H.M.
--
Heinz Marloth   Seehofstraße 15   D-60594  Frankfurt, Germany
Tel.  069 - 61 23 94              eMail:  marloth _at__ t-online.de
~~
Wir leben in einem Zeitalter der Ueberarbeitung und der Unterbildung, 
in einem Zeitalter, in dem die Menschen so fleissig sind, 
dass sie verdummen.
[ Oscar Wilde ]