Liz Dengate-Thrush Internet Entrepreneurship Foundation
InternetNZ has set up a foundation in honor of Liz Dengate-Thrush, and has started it off with a large donation. Please consider contributing.
Improving ICANN meetings
I'm optimistic that these meetings are going to get better. If you have ever been to an ICANN meeting and have suggestions about formats or aspirations, funneling them through the ICANNWiki would be great. There's a specific meetings page here.
Public Forum II
Last chance to make your views publicly known to the Board of ICANN during this meeting: tomorrow, Thursday, from 9am to 1pm.
The agenda includes a report from the Governmental Advisory Committee and the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, plus an update on strategic planning. No reports from Board committees will be read. We promise.
Then the Board will have an official meeting Friday morning.
If you're interested in being on the Board, there's a Nominating Committee Workshop from 2-3pm tomorrow. The Nominating Committee is very interested in finding new candidates — information is here. Many warm congratulations to Rita Rodin on her election to the Board by the GNSO.
Someday next week, after a sad trip to New Zealand to represent ICANN at Peter Dengate-Thrush's wife's funeral, I'll get back to blogging. I heard tonight that there was a tie vote in the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee — an amazing victory — an 11-11 vote on net neutrality and Snowe-Dorgan.
2007 sounds like a good time to get legislative confirmation of a neutral internet in the United States. I'm looking forward to catching up on the news.
Reminder — Dept. of Commerce looking for comments
These days of ICANNing are really busy. I feel so far away from D.C. I do know that the weather was awful there today and that the Dept of Commerce basement was flooded.
I also know that July 7 is coming up soon. That's the date by which the Dept. of Commerce would like comments on their Notice of Inquiry on “The Continued Transition of the Technical Coordination and Management of the Internet Domain Name and Addressing System.”
The notice is here. Send comments to DNSTransition at ntia.doc.gov (you'll need to also send via paper). Comments already received are here.
ICANN IRC channel
We miss Joi, but there's a chat channel for anyone interested in talking about the Marrakech meeting or particular policy topics:
irc://irc.freenode.net#icannmarrakech
Blog blip
I'm in Marrakech, Morocco for the latest ICANN meeting. I had big plans for evaluating the FCC's recent USF for VoIP releases (a little hard to do in the absence of the Order, but we can try) and becoming a new expert on media concentration.
Can't do it.
There's too much going on here — particularly when it comes to Whois. My aim here is to support the GNSO process and continue to push for a timeline by which we can get some decisions on non-public access to registration data. My other aim is to keep working on transparency of all kinds. It's impossible to tell from the outside what goes on at these meetings. I'd like to confirm that the GNSO is holding to the Board's expectations when it comes to new gTLDs. (More nudging re deadlines.) And I'd like to understand what happened to the GNSO Review — one of the most important things ICANN is doing in 2006.
I can report that there are unbelievable markets here, crammed full of beautiful things, down dark alleys; the nights are clear and cool; the buildings are clay fortresses, or clay fortress-like; they have a mysterious currency that all has to be spent here — and I'll be in meetings for most of the next seven days. I'll send word when I can.
Creative Commons and Microsoft
Microsoft has now made it ridiculously easy for anyone to adopt a Creative Commons license in connection with material created using Microsoft tools. Choose from a menu, and presto! one of those cool Creative Commons buttons will attach itself to your stuff.
Good for Microsoft. I think this is a very positive, helpful, and creative thing to do. If you want people to be able to use your material, they've made it simple for you to make that declaration. And good for Creative Commons, a worldwide movement that is contributing daily to the public domain.
Press release is here — early CNET article is here.
Update: Download of the plug-in is here.
What is the internet?
For the engineers, particularly the Original Engineers, the internet is a logical architecture that allows us to connect virtually any kind of networking machine together. That architecture can change.
Here's the 1995 Federal Networking Council definition of “the internet”:
The Federal Networking Council (FNC) agrees that the following language reflects our definition of the term “Internet”.“Internet” refers to the global information system that – (i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, (ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols, and (iii) provides, uses, or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.
There are two key things to notice about the Engineers' approach. First, this definition of the “internet” emphasizes globally unique addressing (supporting interconnectivity) and the use of TCP/IP, but makes clear that these elements can change.
IP can have “extensions/follow-ons,” TCP/IP can be subsumed by “other IP-compatible protocols,” and services using communications infrastructure can be made available privately or publicly, depending on what makes sense. Any logical architecture that provides for interconnection between networks and a set of agreed-on protocols (with some connection to the historical TCP/IP suite) will be “the internet” to the Engineers.
Second, the FNC/Engineer definition does not recognize the role of the transport pipes, because the Engineers are indifferent to transport. What they care about is the logical architecture, the overarching set of protocols that brought different networks together. And could change.
The telcos have a different way of looking at things — they see “the internet” as the pipes, and don't care much about the religion of the original protocols.
But the two groups, the Engineers and the Telcos, have common ground: the protocols are expected to change. They can change and we'll still have “the internet”.
There's a third group — let's call it the internet visionaries group — who focus on the social and cultural effects of the internet, and use those effects to shape their own definition of “the internet.” What they care about are standards that allow end-to-end communication and relationships that the pipes don't control. They're not so sure the protocols should change. If they change, it won't be “the internet” any more.
Reporting
Jim Lehrer was on On Point tonight. His point: there will always be a demand for high-quality, professional news reporting. And so therefore it will always exist. Yes, people fire off emails and bloggers do their posts, but what they're all doing is reacting to the news — and where did the news come from? From professional reporters.
If you listen to the clip, you can hear his total dedication to the cause of mainstream news gathering. Someone has to collect the news, he says. Yes, we need to align the revenue streams with the news reporting, but we'll do that. We'll survive, he says. Online portions of news organizations are doing extremely well, he says.
Jay Rosen, meanwhile, is taking on the challenge:
It's a “put up or shut up” moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like… distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting… and put them to work to break news?
This is the question to which Jim Lehrer's answer would be, “No way.” No such thing. Professionals gather news and assess what's a story and what isn't. Just a small matter of finding a sustainable business model, but we're not leaving.
To find out what Jay Rosen has in mind, and what the rest of the wise crowd thinks is possible for non-traditional news reporting, it sounds like the place to be is BloggerConIV (on June 23, late morning, San Francisco).
Naked aggression
This story from the SF Chronicle today is a keeper. AT&T/SBC was required as part of the merger to offer standalone (naked) DSL. This means that consumers shouldn't have to buy traditional telephone service from AT&T in order to buy DSL service.
AT&T used to claim that DSL cost $29.99 a month. Traditional telephone service cost (at least) $16 a month. So the whole package (pre-merger-compliance) was about $45 a month.
Now, AT&T is offering DSL alone, as it is required to do. The cost? $44.99 a month. AT&T would prefer that people buy packages, and so it is not making it cost-effective to buy DSL on its own. Why bother? From the Chronicle story, by Ryan Kim:
AT&T spokesman John Britton said the standalone price accurately reflects the real cost of DSL, and highlights the value the company places in its bundled service.
“Bundled services continue to deliver the greatest value to consumers,” he said. “Most standalone services will have higher prices than bundled service.”
Far be it from us, the blogosphere, to question AT&T's pricing policies. But it does seem that the company isn't subject to real competition. If it were, surely the unbundled cost of DSL would be substantially lower. Hang onto this story.
Here's the picture, from JG Etc.