U.N. to ICANN: We Can Do It Better > It's ours

said by Varangian:

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THe internet is an entirely American invention, the resut of our tax dollars.
Handing contol to the UN is unacceptable. Period.

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The key new project was the development of an idea he had originated in 1965: that to achieve communication between computers a fast message-switching communication service was needed, in which long messages were split into chunks sent separately so as to minimise the risk of congestion. The chunks he called packets, and the technique became known as packet-switching.

His network design was received enthusiastically by America's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), and the Arpanet and the NPL local network became the first two computer networks in the world using the technique. Today's Internet can be traced back directly to this origin.

said by x_:

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The United Kingdom is hardly a backwards third-world country.

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said by logcabinboy:

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said by x_:

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The United Kingdom is hardly a backwards third-world country.

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Yes it is.

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said by x_:

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said by Varangian:

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THe internet is an entirely American invention, the resut of our tax dollars.
Handing contol to the UN is unacceptable. Period.

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Afraid not.

Have you heard of Tim Berners-Lee who developed the first Web browser and Web server, and is head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)?

He's British not American.

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Charter Pipeline rules in Hesperia, CA , Verizon (ex-GTE) sucks...

said by dave:

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Those who forget history, etc.

In case you don't remember back to those heady days of, say, 1990, the web was what made the Internet the mass-market phenomenon that it is today. Before then, we were using mostly SMTP and FTP (and of course my own distributed-scrabble protocol, Scrabble Network Architecture, sadly unpublished due to legal constraints on both the game and the acronym). Without the web there would be very little Internet use 'at home' - the web is what made the net safe for commerce.

So, if Americans would like to take their Internet Protocol and go home, I think that would be just fine, as long as they realise that it'll be operating without HTTP or HTML (the W3 Consortium will have to move back to Geneva).

This is, of course, a fatuous reply. The American part of the Internet can't live without the web any more than the global Internet can live without the American part.

By the way, for the record, I can't see the UN doing a particularly good job. They'd be far too influenced by PTTs. I prefer the IETF's approach of "implement then standardize" over the ISO's "standardize then implement" any day. OSI protocol stack, anyone? (I speak as someone who has implemented some OSI protocols).

But just because I'm not in favour of the UN running the 'net doesn't mean I see eye to eye with all this "it's ours" short-sighted jingoistic nonsense.

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