[governance] Unsubscribing ACLU (Dateline 1953)

[Karl Auerbach]

On 08/08/2009 06:03 PM, Yehuda Katz wrote:

> I think its time to evolve, WE have some wonderful people here, Dr Milton
> Müller and a host of other Minds of Academia worldwide, Karl Auerbach the
> Father of Email (SMTP protocol

I had very little to do with the development of email structures and 
protocols.  Much credit for that goes to Dave Crocker.

My one claim to fame for email is that way, way, way back (in the early 
1980's) at Interactive Systems (the first commercial Unix company) I 
build an email system built on an underlying "queued file transfer 
mechanism" (hop-by-hop transfer of a chunk of application layer data 
from one program to another) upon which we built an email system (and 
printing system, and many other systems).  Eric A. of Sendmail fame 
heard me talk about that at a Usenix in San Francisco and what I said 
may or may not have had an effect on what eventually became "sendmail", 
a program that worked on much the same underlying idea.

My main work back in the ancient era was on operating system security 
for the US and UK governments (formal proof of correctness, capability 
based architectures, etc) and secure networking.  Unfortunately most of 
that work is unavailable to the public and probably won't be publicly 
publishable until several more decades pass.

But you can partially blame me for helping cause the split of IP from 
TCP (in the original Cerf/Kahn design TCP was a monolithic protocol), 
CIFS and SNMP and some other stuff.

What all of this is to say is that we ought not to deify any one of us 
who were lucky to be part of "the early days" of the net.  I certainly 
am not any smarter than many newcomers.

Which leads me a link to internet governance - I have noticed that users 
of the net tend to give too much deference to technical assertions from 
some of us "old guys".  We who built the net have a lot of pride in the 
net and that pride can induce a subtle parental protective suspicion and 
hostility against new ideas that might change our baby.

My favorite phrase is one attributed to Thomas Aquinas: "Locus ab 
auctoritate est infirmissimus" ("The argument from authority is the 
weakest.") - I like the irony of using a saint, an authority of the 
Catholic church as an assertion of authority to say that assertions of 
authority might be wrong.

As I mentioned the other day, one of the issues of internet governance 
is the problem of separating those things that are mandated by technical 
necessity from those thing that are merely one possible way that a 
technology can be used but that has ossified into being perceived as the 
only way.

Most of us have the ability to "question authority" in a political 
context.  But to make internet governance work we are going to have to 
learn to be equally skeptical of assertions of technical necessity and 
be sufficiently skilled in the technical arts that we can make valid 
independent assessments.

		--karl--

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