[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.
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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.
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Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 9 No 1 Winter 1998-1999.
The whole issue or a subscription are available for free via email.
Send a request to jrh@ais.org or see http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/
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