[3] Report From INET98 and IFWP-Geneva by Jay Hauben jrh@ais.org From July 20 to 24, 1998, 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 cannot 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 e-mail 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 Democratizationtion, 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 band width applications priority treatment while e-mail 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. In this project over 130 U.S. 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. E-mail 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. 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 e-mail addresses and a sense that the Internet was creating a world community and spreading a new communications technology that could help interconnect 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 held after the INET conference ended was not a planned extension of INET98 but a last minute event. The U.S. 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 U.S. government 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 had 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 a 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, e.g., 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 was 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 was 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" at http://www.columbia.edu/~jrh29/acn/dns-supplement.txt and http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/dns-supplement.txt and by e-mail from jrh@ais.org. Comments are welcomed. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 9 No 1 Winter 1998-1999. 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