[governance] IANA contract to be opened for competitive bidding on November 4

[John Curran]

On Oct 24, 2011, at 2:14 PM, Bertrand de La Chapelle wrote:
> As I never fail to remind people whenever the comment "the US invented the Internet" sentence is uttered in such a context, what we call "the Internet" today is more the World Wide Web than the actual infrastructure of IP networks.

Agreed - from the perspective of the average Internet user... it really does not 
matter if IP transport and DNS are working fine, if the web page doesn't load, 
"The Internet" is down.  :-)

> If the Internet and its protocols were indeed invented by people in the context of a DARPA research contract, the Web was invented in Europe, by a British citizen. And if a Frenchman says it, ...it may be true :-) 

Definitively true: while much work happened globally on making the world wide web
a success, the invention itself has a clear origin with TimBL's efforts.  The early URL 
standardization work (starting with the Living Documents BoF in March 1992 IETF in 
San Diego) was a huge push forward, but that was more about expanding the existing
work from CERN to encompass new protocols and encodings.

> The Internet as an infrastructure and all applications built upon it are probably the most successful distributed collaborative effort in the history of mankind. The origin is important to explain path dependency, but is only an element in the general current landscape. 

Correct.  I seldom even bother to delve into the "Internet" history discussions, but if
one wishes to understand the lineage of the various interlocking claims of authority,
it can be a necessary burden.

/John

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t