[Lac] gobierno de internet - material

[Diego Saravia]

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http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i07/07b02001.htm
http://news.com.com/Should+the+United+Nations+run+the+Internet%
3F/2010-1028_3-5181327.html
http://hippy.com/manifesto.htm
http://www.internetmanifesto.org/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=es&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oi=defmore&q=define:Internet
http://hem.passagen.se/peder/essay1.htm
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/is99/governance/barlow.html
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/is99/desc.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~pols/ps17971/asia1/mayro.html

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http://www.worldofends.com/

World of Ends
What the Internet Is and
How to Stop Mistaking It
for Something Else.
by
Doc Searls and
David Weinberger

Last update: 4.28.03

There are mistakes and there are mistakes.

Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for pets
on the Web is a great way to get rich. We're not going to do that again.

Other mistakes we insist on making over and over. For example, thinking that:

    * ...the Web, like television, is a way to hold eyeballs still while
advertisers spray them with messages.
    * ...the Net is something that telcos and cable companies should filter,
control and otherwise "improve."
    * ... it's a bad thing for users to communicate between different kinds of
instant messaging systems on the Net.
    * ...the Net suffers from a lack of regulation to protect industries that
feel threatened by it.

When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome.
This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting,
cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone
industry, to name just six.

Thanks to the enormous influence of those industries in Washington, Repetitive
Mistake Syndrome also afflicts lawmakers, regulators and even the courts. Last
year Internet radio, a promising new industry that threatened to give
listeners choices far exceeding anything on the increasingly variety-less (and
technologically  stone-age) AM and FM bands, was shot in its cradle. Guns,
ammo and the occasional "Yee-Haw!" were provided by the recording industry and
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which embodies all the fears felt by
Hollywood's alpha dinosaurs when they lobbied the Act through Congress in 1998.

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," John
Gilmore famously said. And it's true. In the long run, Internet radio will
succeed. Instant messaging systems will interoperate. Dumb companies will get
smart or die. Stupid laws will be killed or replaced. But then, as John
Maynard Keynes also famously said, "In the long run, we're all dead."

All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It's not
hard. The Net isn't rocket science. It isn't even 6th grade science fair, when
you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake
Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars’ worth of dumb
decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of
ends. You're at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.

Sure, that’s a feel-good statement about everyone having value on the Net,
etc. But it’s also the basic rock-solid fact about the Net's technical
architecture. And the Internet’s value is founded in its technical architecture.

Fortunately, the true nature of the Internet isn’t hard to understand. In
fact, just a fistful of statements stands between Repetitive Mistake Syndrome
and Enlightenment

	

Essential Links

End-to-End Arguments in System Design (Clark, Reed, Saltzer)

Rise of the Stupid Network (Isenberg)

The Internet (Washington Internet Project)

10 Right Choices (Bradner)

The Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine, Locke, Searls, Weinberger)

The Paradox of the Best Network (Isenberg, Weinberger)

End Game (Lessig)

Open Access to the FCC, (Lessig & Lemley)

Frankston & Reed pages

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Center for the Public Domain

Why Open Spectrum Matters (Weinberger)

Open Spectrum FAQ

 

About the Authors

Doc Searls [link] [mail]

David Weinberger [link] [mail]

Send a message to both

Discuss this article

The Nutshell

1. The Internet isn't complicated
2. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges.
6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
8. The Internet’s three virtues:
   a. No one owns it
   b. Everyone can use it
   c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already

 
1. The Internet isn't complicated.

    The idea behind the Internet in the first place was to harness the awesome
power of simplicity — as simple as gravity in the real world. Except instead
of holding little rocks tight against the big round rock, the Internet was
designed to hold smaller networks together, turning them into one big network.

    The way to do that is to make it easy easy easy for the networks to send
and receive data to and from one another. Thus, the Internet was designed to
be the simplest conceivable way to get bits from any A to any B.

 
2. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement.

    When we look at utility poles, we see networks as wires. And we see those
wires as parts of systems: The phone system, the electric power system, the
cable TV system.

    When we listen to radio or watch TV, we're told during every break that
networks are sources of programming being beamed through the air or through
cables.

    But the Internet is different. It isn't wiring. It isn't a system. And it
isn't a source of programming.

    The Internet is a way for all the things that call themselves networks to
coexist and work together. It's an inter-network. Literally.

    What makes the Net inter is the fact that it's just a protocol — the
Internet Protocol, to be exact.  A protocol is an agreement about how things
work together.

    This protocol doesn’t specify what people can do with the network, what
they can build on its edges, what they can say, who gets to talk. The protocol
simply says: If you want to swap bits with others, here’s how. If you want to
put a computer – or a cell phone or a refrigerator – on the network, you have
to agree to the agreement that is the Internet.

 
3. The Internet is stupid.

    The telephone system, which is not the Internet (at least not yet), is
damn smart. It knows who's calling whom, where they're located, whether it's a
voice or data call, how far the call reaches, how much the call costs, etc.
And it provides services that only a phone network cares about: call waiting,
caller ID, *69 and lots of other stuff that phone companies like to sell.

    The Internet, on the other hand, is stupid.1 On purpose. Its designers
made sure the biggest, most inclusive network of them all was dumb as a box of
rocks.

    The Internet doesn’t know lots of things a smart network like the phone
system knows: Identities, permissions, priorities, etc. The Internet only
knows one thing: this bunch of bits needs to move from one end of the Net to
another.

    There are technical reasons why stupidity is a good design. Stupid is
sturdy. If a router fails, packets route around it, meaning that the Net stays
up. Thanks to its stupidity, the Net welcomes new devices and people, so it
grows quickly and in all directions. It's also easy for architects to
incorporate Net access into all kinds of smart devices — camcorders,
telephones, sprinkler systems — that live at the Net's ends.

    That's because the most important reason Stupid is Good has less to do
with technology and everything to do with value...

 
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.

    Sounds screwy, but it's true. If you optimize a network for one type of
application, you de-optimize it for others. For example, if you let the
network give priority to voice or video data on the grounds that they need to
arrive faster, you are telling other applications that they will have to wait.
And as soon as you do that, you have turned the Net from something simple for
everybody into something complicated for just one purpose. It isn't the
Internet anymore.

 
5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges.

    If the Internet were a smart network, its designers would have anticipated
the importance of a good search engine and would have built searching into the
network itself. But because its designers were smart, they made the Net too
stupid for that. So searching is a service that can be built at one of the
million ends of the Internet. Because people can offer any services they want
from their end, search engines have competed, which means choice for users and
astounding innovation.

    Search engines are just an example. Because all the Internet does is throw
bits from one end to another, innovators can build whatever they can imagine,
counting on the Internet to move data for them. You don’t have to get
permission from the Internet’s owner or systems administrator or the Vice
President of Service Prioritization. You have an idea? Do it. And every time
you do, the value of the Internet goes up.

    The Internet has created a free market for innovation. That’s the key to
the Internet's value. By the same token...

 
6. Money moves to the suburbs.

    If all of the Internet’s value is at its edges, Internet connectivity
itself wants to become a commodity. It should be allowed to do so.

    There’s good business in providing commodities, but every attempt to add
value to the Internet itself must be resisted. To be specific: Those who
provide Internet connectivity inevitably will want to provide content and
services also because the connectivity itself will be too low-priced. By
keeping the two functions separate, we will enable the market to set prices
that will maximize access and to maximize content/service innovation.2

 
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.

    When Craig Burton describes the Net's stupid architecture as a hollow
sphere comprised entirely of ends3, he’s painting a picture that gets at
what’s most remarkable about the Internet’s architecture: Take the value out
of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected
end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and
each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.

    And what do we ends do? Anything that can be done by anyone who wants to
move bits around.

    Notice the pride in our voice when we say “anything” and “anyone”? That
comes directly from the Internet’s simple, stupid technical architecture.

    Because the Internet is an agreement, it doesn’t belong to any one person
or group. Not the incumbent companies that provide the backbone. Not the ISPs
that provide our connections. Not the hosting companies that rent us servers.
Not the industry associations that believe their existence is threatened by
what the rest of us do on the Net. Not any government, no matter how sincerely
it believes that it's just trying to keep its people secure and complacent.

    To connect to the Internet is to agree to grow value on its edges. And
then something really interesting happens. We are all connected equally.
Distance doesn’t matter. The obstacles fall away and for the first time the
human need to connect can be realized without artificial barriers.

    The Internet gives us the means to become a world of ends for the first time.

 
8. The Internet’s three virtues

    So, those are the facts about the Internet. See, we told you they were simple.

    But what do they mean for our behavior 
 and more importantly, the
behavior of the mega-corps and governments that until now have acted as if the
Internet were theirs?

    Here are three basic rules of behavior that are tied directly to the
factual nature of the Internet: 

    No one owns it.
    Everyone can use it.
    Anyone can improve it.

    Let's look a little more closely at each...

 
8.a Nobody owns it

    It can't be owned, even by the companies whose "pipes" it passes through,
because it is an agreement, not a thing. The Internet not only is in the
public domain, it is a public domain.

    And that’s a good thing:

        * The Internet is a reliable resource. We can build businesses without
having to worry that Internet, Inc. is going to force us to upgrade, double
its price once we have bought in, or get taken over by one of our competitors.
        * We don't have to worry that some parts of it are going to work with
one provider and others will work with some other provider, like we have with
the cell phone business in the U. S. today.
        * We don't have to worry that its basic functions are only going to
work with Microsoft's, Apple's or AOL's "platform" — because it sits beneath
all of them, outside their proprietary control.
        * Maintaining the Internet is distributed among all users, not
concentrated in the hands of a provider that might go out of business, and all
of us are a more resilient resource than any centralized group of us could be.

 
8.b Everyone can use it

    The Internet was built to include everyone on the planet.

    True, only a tenth of the world – a mere 600,000,000+ people – currently
connects to the Internet. So "can" in the phrase "Everybody can use it" is
subject to the miserable inequities of fortune. But, if you're lucky enough to
possess sufficient material wealth for a connection and a connective device,
the network itself imposes no obstacles to participation. You don't need a
system administrator to deign to let you participate. The Internet
purposefully leaves permissions out of the system.

    That's also why the Internet feels to so many of us like a natural
resource. We have flocked to it as if it were a part of human nature just
waiting to happen — just as speaking and writing now feel like a part of what
it means to be human.

 
8.c Anybody can improve it

    Anyone can make the Internet a better place to live, work and raise up
kids. It takes a real blockhead with a will of iron to make it worse.

    There are two ways to make it better. First, you can build a service on
the edge of the Net that’s available to anyone who wants. Make it free, make
people pay for it, put out a tin cup, whatever.

    Second, you can do something more important: enable a whole new set of
end-of-Net services by coming up with a new agreement. That’s how email was
created. And newsgroups. And even the Web. The creators of these services
didn’t simply come up with end-based applications, and they sure didn’t tinker
with the Internet protocol itself. Instead, they came up with new protocols
that use the Internet as it exists, the way the agreement about how to encode
images on paper enabled fax machines to use telephone lines without requiring
any changes to the phone system itself.

    Remember, though, that if you come up with a new agreement, for it to
generate value as quickly as the Internet itself did, it needs to be open,
unowned, and for everyone. That’s exactly why Instant Messaging has failed to
achieve its potential: The leading IM systems of today — AOL's AIM and ICQ and
Microsoft's MSN Messenger — are private territories that may run on the Net,
but they are not part of the Net. When AOL and Microsoft decide they should
run their IM systems using a stupid protocol that nobody owns and everybody
can use, they will have improved the Net enormously. Until then, they're just
being stupid, and not in the good sense.

 
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?

    Could it be because the three Internet virtues are the antithesis of how
governments and businesses view the world?

    Nobody owns it: Businesses are defined by what they own, as governments
are defined by what they control.

    Everybody can use it: In business, selling goods means transferring
exclusive rights of use from the vendor to the buyer; in government, making
laws means imposing restrictions on people.

    Anybody can improve it: Business and government cherish authorized roles.
It's the job of only certain people to do certain things, to make the right
changes.

    Business and government by their natures are predisposed to misunderstand
the Internet's nature.

    There's another reason the Internet hasn't done a great job explaining
itself: The Big Money would prefer to keep telling us the Net is just slow TV.

    The Internet has been too much like that other Walt who wrote in "Song of
Myself": I do not trouble myself to be understood. I see that the elementary
laws never apologize.

    On the other hand, the Internet’s elementary laws never figured people
would build careers on not understanding them.

 
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already.

    The companies whose value came from distributing content in ways the
market no longer wants – can you hear us Recording Industry? – can stop
thinking that bits are like really lightweight atoms. You are never going to
prevent us from copying the bits we want. Instead, why not give us some
reasons to prefer buying music from you? Hell, we might even help you sell
your stuff if you asked us to.

    The government types who have confused the value of the Internet with the
value of its contents could realize that in tinkering with the Internet's
core, they're actually driving down its value. In fact, they maybe could see
that having a system that transports all bits equally, without government or
industry censorship, is the single most powerful force for democracy and open
markets in history.

    The incumbent providers of networking services — Hint: It begins with
"tele" and ends with "com" — could accept that the stupid network is going to
swallow their smart network. They could bite the bullet now rather than
running up hundreds of billions of dollars in costs delaying and fighting the
inevitable.

    The federal agency responsible for allocating spectrum might notice that
the value of open spectrum is the same as the true value of the Internet.

    Those who would censor ideas might realize that the Internet couldn't tell
a good bit from a bad bit if it bit it on its naughty bits. Whatever
censorship is going to occur will have to occur on the Net's ends – and it's
not going to work very well.

    Perhaps companies that think they can force us to listen to their messages
— their banners, their interruptive graphic crawls over the pages we're trying
to read — will realize that our ability to flit from site to site is built
into the Web’s architecture. They might as well just put up banners that say
"Hi! We don't understand the Internet. Oh, and, by the way, we hate you."

    Enough already. Let's stop banging our heads against the facts of the
Internet life.

    We have nothing to lose but our stupidity.

 

Notes

1. See End-to-End Arguments in System Design (J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D.
Clark. Also see David Isenberg's Rise of the Stupid Network.
2. See The Paradox of the Best Network by Isenberg and Weinberger
3. Doc's interview with Craig Burton.

Thanks to Sloan Kelly for the design tips.



-- 
Diego Saravia 
dsa at unsa.edu.ar