[governance] Internet blackout in Egypt

[Karl Auerbach]

On 01/28/2011 07:35 AM, Nyangkwe Agien Aaron wrote:

> But Internet ws created by man not out of any said government policy
> (I hope Tim Lee will not disagree here)

TBL did his work 20 to 25 years after the net began moving packets. 
Some might disagree, but I draw a continuous line from the ARPAnet of 
the late 1960s to the internet of today.

I was there when the ARPAnet started - 1968 or '69 - 4th floor of 
Boalter Hall, UCLA.

(I was working with the institute of traffic engineering - early car 
crashing and stuff - on an IBM 7094.  The Sigma 7 with IMP #1 was in the 
next room.  The Sigma ran the "Sigma EXecutive" - guess what was written 
on the the spines of all the system manuals? ;-)

In any event I don't remember who funded that UCLA work, but a couple of 
years later (1972) when I worked on net protocols and network security 
at System Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica we were most definitely 
funded by the US Gov't and we most definitely worked on the basis of 
network nodes being vaporized in nuclear fireballs.  (It was ironic - we 
were working in a building constructed several years earlier 
specifically to house a US NORAD SAGE computer, the Q7, serious cold war 
stuff.)

(When I was at SDC we all read and were greatly and positively 
influenced by the technical papers of Louis Pouzin - who is present on 
this list.  The folks in France seemed to grasp the commercial and 
social potential of networking long before we did in the US.)

I believe that until around 1980 the majority of network development 
funding came out of the US (and UK) gov'ts, largely the military parts. 
  Even our beloved Unix came via the UC Berkeley release (BSD) that was 
funded by the US Dep't of Energy.)

The world wide web - which really is merely one application of many 
layered upon the internet - came along in the mid 1990's, a decade after 
the switch of the net from NCP to IP.

> What is happening in Egypt is sure sign that the Oligarchy there is
> living its last moments...

Be careful - the events in France of 1789 led rather quickly to 
Napoleon, the 1917 revolution in Russia soon led to Lenin.  The chaos of 
a falling government opens the door to many influences, not all of which 
are necessarily of a liberal or democratic spirit.

		--karl--


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