[governance] Re: Russia plans to create independent web / internet

[David Allen]

At 3:37 PM -0400 10/12/07, veni markovski wrote:
>this is one time when it is worth beleving what you see... AFTER you check the facts.

hmmm ... it appears that I don't know to check facts before I post.

This sort of insult is what make this list a pleasure and the dialog effective ...

Yes, members of this list have been in touch with all of the above - in fact over a protracted period (certainly also at ICANN meetings, but hardly there as the main focus ...), working on the outcome reported in the Russian article.  Rather than a stalking horse, the piece reports results of long effort.

Yes, the text had been posted here the day before.  But the list did not have it as a doc.  (We waited to post here, until the news article was out.  At least this time, the lag was only a few months, from the article date in July, not the three years lag when we broke to the West the Chinese root.)

No, I do not understand Russian, but the file had to transit my hard drive, from Russia, to get to the post.

As when news of the Chinese root broke, apologists for ICANN explained how it wasn't real and didn't matter.  Then ICANN began furiously to rev up its IDN effort.

What matters, for those who might carry forward the work of the 'Net, is the emergence of a new architecture.  Rather than an unseeing, insulting response, those who have eyes, see.  And respond thoughtfully.  And help lay the ground for next stages.

Fortunately, there is some thoughtful engagement:

At 5:48 PM +0200 10/13/07, Avri Doria wrote:
>... the Internet is a network of networks.  if someone builds a [ ] network ... and then ... some sort of gateway ... joining dissimilar ...

Here, we see glimmers of the new architecture.

[reordered]
>i think that if Russia wants to spend its resources on developing a new infrastructure, good for them.  and at some point that new infrastructure will connect to the rest of the world's infrastructure.

We need to understand that the IDN technology invented ten years ago - now being actualized in linguistic societies one-by-one - was in fact designed from the beginning to connect seamlessly disparate pools of diversity.  From the getgo.  No measures needed to assure interconnection with the rest of the world.  And that is happening now, and so it has been for years.

Seamlessly.  Interconnection.  With no trace of instability.  For years.

Unfortunately on the other main policy front that this must inevitably invoke, censorship, parties are fully inflamed.

>... i would contend that where there is the will traffic will get through. 
>traffic will always get through.  and if somewhere it doesn't, and people want it to, some new bit of technology will come along to enable the traffic get through. ...

Unfortunately - again - the evidence is not with this conclusion, to date.  In the ever-escalating war of anti-censor vs censor tools, the ability to block remains, very widely confirmed.

[reordered]
>the really cool thing about the Internet through its many years is how is absorbs most any other network or technology that rises up.

This for last, because it helps point at whether our problems are technological or people-based.  As far as I can see - as with another major (shooting) war, currently underway, also with inflamed rhetoric - policy, regarding human behavior, not technical tools of war, will in the end determine the day.

If that is correct, we know where to put our intellectual firepower and our policy advocacy.

David
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