WWW III.0

[Alex Gakuru]

Very illuminating piece! We're currently facing the same dilemma over here,
a sneaky back-door takeover (illegal as per the Kenya Information and
Communications Act) of our National Registry by a commercial interests club
TESPOK (Telecommunications Services Providers of Kenya).
http://www.wanjiku.co.ke/2012/08/kenic-ceo-fires-first-salvo-at-govt-terminates-all-employees/


On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 7:54 PM, JFC Morfin <jefsey at jefsey.com> wrote:

>  Dar folks,
>
> I am surprised and somewhat dismayed that no one in “Civil Society” and
> @LARGEs seems interested and that no one is discussing the “W.W.W. 3.0”
> episode that is now developing. I name WWW 3.0 as the Whole World War at
> the “3.0” level that concerns us all. This episode is the attempt of the
> commercial funding (and not the ITU) to take over ultimate control of
> international standardization's future throughout and through the Internet
> standardization process (IAB/IETF/ISOC), reversing its documented position
> in RFC 3869 and 3935 and hijacking innovation trends (the "3.0" coming
> layers).
>
> *1.       Why do I talk of “commercial funding”?
> *
> Because the IAB warned us of the danger that we are facing and explained
> how to avoid it in RFC 3869 (Aug. 2004) and neither Governments, nor Civil
> Society or International Organizations, did anything about it. Only a small
> kernel of us tried to do something.
>
> In Aug. 2004, the IAB stated: “The principal thesis of this document is
> that if commercial funding is the main source of funding for future
> Internet research, the future of the Internet infrastructure could be in
> trouble. In addition to issues about which projects are funded, the funding
> source can also affect the content of the research, for example, towards or
> against the development of open standards, or taking varying degrees of
> care about the effect of the developed protocols on the other traffic on
> the Internet.”
>
> This resulted from “the reduced U.S. Government funding and
> profit-focused, low-risk, short-term industry funding has been a decline in
> higher-risk but more innovative research activities. Industry has also been
> less interested in research to evolve the overall Internet architecture,
> because such work does not translate into a competitive advantage for the
> firm funding such work.” Therefore, IAB believed “that it would be helpful
> for governments and other non-commercial sponsors to increase their funding
> of both basic research and applied research relating to the Internet, and
> to sustain these funding levels going forward.”
>
>    -  In Tunis the world’s Governments left the US Government to take
>    care of the Legacy Internet and did not get themselves involved in the
>    emergence of any architectural research.
>    -  The IETF did not participate in the WSIS nor get involved in the
>    IGF.
>    -  Civil society non-commercial sponsors or helpers did not join our
>    successful efforts (so far) at the IETF:
>       -  To protect languages and cultures from engineering and business
>       control.
>       - Introduce a civil society technical place at the IETF (the
>       Internet Users Contributing Group)
>       - To obtain the validation of an Intelligent Use (IUse) Interface
>       (IUI) concepts.
>    -  We feel alone in creating the Intelligent Use Task Force (IUTF) to
>    explore, document, validate, and deploy the people centric capacity
>    demanded by the WSIS.
>
> 2.       *Why do I use “3.0”?
>
> *This is because in a nutshell if “2.0” has now an accepted meaning, the
> 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 "notions" (i.e. all of what can relate to a topic) can be
> perceived as:
>
>    - “1.0” meaning: server centric monologue, and related
>    - “2.0” meaning: network centric dialogue, and related
>    - and “3.0” meaning: people centric polylogue, and related.
>
>  So,
>
>    - “Master/Slave” initial Web connections are “1.0”.
>    - Wikis, AJAX, WebSocket, etc. are “2.0”.
>    - The Internet+, the IUI (intelligent use interface), Midori/Hurd (the
>    Microsoft's and Stallman's expected replacements for Windows and Linux),
>    etc. are “3.0.”
>
> Another "technical way" to understand this might be, in strict, simple,
> and robust concordance with RFC 1958, which defines the internet
> architecture, to say that:
>
>    - 1.0 builds atop “plug to plug” hardware,
>    - 2.0 builds atop “end to end” software,
>    - and 3.0 atop “fringe to fringe” middleware.
>
>  Two key points remain, however: what about “0.0” and “4.0” and exactly
> what is “3.0”?
>
>    -  “0.0” is everything that we do in order to communicate and
>    understand information without digital tools in mind and that is
>    generically called semiotics. “4.0” is what our brains do through digital
>    semiotics that we can call brainware.
>    -  “3.0” is what RFC 1958 states that we must put at the fringe: *network
>    intelligent services*. It is only some plugged layers on the user side
>    (PLUS), extending the OSI communication model, along with its
>    administration and governance. The “OSEX” model extended layers concern:
>       - Security (and presentation in the Internet case).
>       - Network services.
>       - Interoperations between network applications and services
>
>  In the users’ life, it should appear as personal distributed middleware
> empowering browsers (in computers, mobiles, tablets, appliances, TVs,
> houses, cars, etc.) with intelligent open services that are free to choose
> their reference providers. One may understand a person’s IUI as an
> “intelligent socket” system acting as private intelligent gateway network
> interfacing the OS of his/her machines and appliances in such a way that it
> makes that person the center of his/her freely selected worldwide digital
> ecosystem.
>
> 3.       *Why do I use “Whole”?
>
> *This is because we do not discuss the Web or even the sole Internet any
> more. We discuss the whole digital ecosystem (WDE), i.e. all the physical
> or logical parallel interconnections to anything digital by our Intelligent
> Use Interface (IUI).
>
> So, what is at stake is the whole digital ecosystem industrial pollution
> (and corruption) and biased innovation. How?
>
> Through market driven commercially sponsored international standards, as
> was just explained by the IAB.
>
> To understand why:
>
>    - a norm is the description of normality. Until now, norms were local
>    (for a country) or professional (for a trade, skill, or task).
>    - Norms, therefore, opposed globalization. This is why the trend that
>    is pushed by the commercial funding is to unify normality, i.e. to shape
>    the world as a unique market.
>
> Hundreds of wars and revolutions have failed to attain that target
> throughout history. Those who Richard Buckminster Fuller calls the "Grand
> Pirates" (in his "Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth") found a simpler
> way after WWI and WW II where they had lost control to engineers (from
> submarines and planes to the atom and computers): to recover control by
> using the common desire for international peace, human rights, democracy,
> etc. and the resulting needs for a better economy through a world market
> and rules.
>
> These rules in technologies are “standards”. They say how to technically
> best build atop of norms. Therefore, they call for common uniform norms,
> and at the same time the international standards progressively shape a new
> “world normality” as, and for, a “common world market”.
>
> This normality must be stable to protect market shares: as we know they
> call this stability the "status quo".
>
> Disruptive and fundamental innovations become a risk. TMs and incremental
> innovation are tuned to keep consumers buying. However, incremental
> innovation must be based upon international standards protecting from a
> competitor’s breakthrough and have to be coherently ubiquitous to keep
> being accepted by the permanently reshaped customers (us).
>
> Industrial evolution is only permitted after amortization and only if it
> increases benefits. However, this is not the lead-users’ (FLOSS, start-ups,
> user R&D, press) pace.
>
> What the Web 2.0 already did to the Internet 1.0 has to be digested and
> reshaped in a commercially favorable landscape of WebApps: this is the task
> of the International Standardization and marketing consensuses.
>
> The IDNA2008 consensus and its progressive propagation throughout the
> protocol space (WG/Precis) shows the coming of the IUI 3.0 and of the
> Internet+ (tested by Google+) – whatever you want to call that Internet
> built-in trend – as ineluctable. The International Standards bodies are to
> confuse and delay its concepts enough for it not to become:
>
>    - An identified, independent, and acknowledged middleware
>    standardization core area (IUTF)
>    - A people centric enhanced cooperation capacity for the internet,
>    social nets, telephone, radio, TV, digital music, e-books, etc. polycratic
>    stewardship.
>
>  Multistakeholderism must stay among commercial leaders, not to extend to
> everyone, especially if Civil Society and ethitechnics (ethical
> considerations in architectural design) are involved.
>
> *4.       Why do I say “World”?
>
> *This is because this does not only concern the sole US market, or the
> Western developed countries market, or even the emergent countries (India,
> China, Russia, etc.), but rather everywhere. This results from the WWWeb
> e-marketing field of competition. All is market driven and the market is
> global. No one must be able to endanger the commercial leaders’ famous
> names and commercial rights anywhere in the world.
>
> The strategy for years has been called “internationalization”: offensive
> business protection through the spread of the commercial leaders’
> industrial technology supported by:
>
>    - favorable commercial conditions
>    - correlative identical local standardization
>    - permitted mass production increases, now on a multinational basis.
>
> A well known example is the Unicode consortium’s (IBM, Microsoft, Apple,
> Google, Yahoo!, Oracle...) successful technical “globalization”:
>
>    - *internationalization* of the media (International English capacity
>    to quote any string in any script, which does not fully support the
>    languages that use the scripts), being the maintainer of the ISO 10646
>    standard.
>    - *localization* (local translation) of the English semantic, which
>    does not support the various cultural semantics
>    - *language tagging* for technical, operational, commercial
>    non-neutral filtering purposes.
>
> This globalization is not a multilingualization that would set out to
> technically treat and culturally respect every language and its
> orthotypography the same as English is treated.
> *
> *4.       *Why do I say "War"?
>
> *Because of:
>
> *1.       the TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) rules* The WTO rules do
> not permit a country to protect its people against a technology (or a TLD,
> as we see with Saudi Arabia and GAC protests) that is an international
> standard.  http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/tbt_e/tbt_e.htm.   This is
> why the ultimate weapon to fight States’ Barriers to Trade is to erode the
> credibility of their legitimate policy objectives, such as: the
> requirements for quality, the respect of cultures and minorities the
> protection of human health and safety, or the environment.  The war is
> then on the Governments and the slogan for the “market forces” is to
> protect ... Human Rights (through free speech in using international market
> standards, for example) against people's Governments.   One of the
> vectors is GNI ( http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/) where
> Microsoft, Google etc. decide on the people’s best interest and defend
> their rights. This is far from democratically transparent technical
> standardization and network neutrality. Certainly civil and human rights
> are to be defended, but is it up to technical standardization bodies to
> defend them? In confusing the issues doesn’t that harm the needed
> international standard technical credibility and lead to political
> restrictions affecting the free flow of information? *2.       The
> competition on us, the users* We (technical and civil society people)
> represent a real danger for industry leaders in being: Uncontrollable
> international competition, potentially rogue, possible divergent definition
> of what is a “better” Internet (in RFC 3935 IETF Mission Statement). Smart
> enough to introduce, propose, defend, and deploy more innovative and people
> centric architectural solutions (i.e. for a “3.0” information society that
> is "people centered, à caractère humain, centrada en la persona"). In the
> same way as the financial crisis is resulting from financially dominant
> people/entities (speculators and corporate interests), the international
> standardization mechanics is to protect market driven standardizing from
> lead users disrupting innovation. 5.       *The strategic impact.*
>
> This battle is now conducted at the ITU, IAB/IETF, IEEE, ISO, Governments
> level.
> *
> *This results in particular from the Dubai December meeting (
> http://world2012.itu.int/) that is to revise the International
> Telecommunications Rules (http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/default.aspx).
> In this debate, commercial leaders plan to oppose and negotiate with States
> alone, since Civil Society is absent and users are represented by their
> Governments.
>
> In the Internet case, the IAB and IETF Chairs (the IAB Chair is a
> Microsoft employee) have prepared a draft document putting the (now ISOC
> affiliate) IETF in the commercial leaders' orbit.
>
> Being the facilitator of the Civil Society IETF iucg at ietf.org mailing
> list and one of the bootstrappers of the “3.0” IUTF (Intelligent Use Task
> Force), I posed the question of us, the IUsers, of the non-consulted IUCG
> channel and of our emergent IUTF standardization pole and called for a
> WG/RFC3869bis (a WG dedicated to rewrite RFC 3869),
>
>    - To consensually adapt the description of the IAB/IETF position
>    regarding the standardization referents (market or people, commerce or
>    sustainable development), as we do not think that market and commercial
>    interests can develop without the support of the end-users.
>    - To document what the IETF means in its mission statement of
>    "influencing those who design, use, and manage the Internet for it to work
>    *better*" and to protect us against the RFC3869 IAB identified threats of
>    sole merchant sponsoring bias of the Internet R&D.
>
> Our remarks have been acknowledged as part of the working file of the IAB
> (Track #202). We also maintain an information portal on the matter and our
> Civil Society Technical Rights in this area at
> http://iutf.org/wiki/Modern_Global_Standards_Paradigm.
>
> The best place for debating and building up a Civil Society technical
> position that can really help as part of the IETF standardization process,
> at least to show that we actually feel concerned by the “constitution of
> the Internet” (the source code as documented by Dr. Lessig) is the non-WG
> (i.e. permanent) iucg at ietf.org mailing list and helping us with the
> http://iucg.org/wiki site.
>
> *6.       A civil society ethitechnical doctrine
> *
> More generally, there is a need for Civil Society to have a technical
> doctrine or at least mutually informed presence. The reason why is that
> technology choices are not ethically neutral.
>
>    - As documented by the IAB RFC 3869, there are no technically rooted
>    influences. They are commercial in the current episode, but they respond to
>    (magnified) real political risks of influences. Civil Society has to make
>    sure that the people’s best interest is the reference.
>    - Network neutrality is something difficult to enforce. The easiest
>    way to get it is to get the technology designed in such a way that it is
>    difficult or costly to not respect it (what is not the case today, but that
>    a “3.0” evolution helps in making it very complex to filter the network).
>    - A multilinguistic internet (the cybernetic of all the languages and
>    cultures considered as equal on the common network) is to be explored and
>    discussed. This is a typical civil society concern and, moreover, the real
>    issue is our (we the people) relations to mecalanguages, i.e. our own
>    native languages as spoken by our machines and in our anthtropobotic
>    society (“on the internet, nobody knows I am a dog” or a machine). We did
>    start in France an effort in that area, creating the MLTF, participating
>    with MAAYA (http://maaya.org) and ITU, UNESCO, SIL, Union Latine,
>    Linguasphere, etc. This effort is to be resumed.
>    - The civil society has accepted a stewardship inherited from the
>    “1.0” legacy. Experience has been gained during the last decade regarding
>    the various forms of governance tools, stakeholders, etc. common
>    decision/trend processes, etc. while the 2.0 evolution and the 3.0
>    preparation will make several of them obsolete.
>    - One of the major concerns, since it is traditionally a main part of
>    the Internet Governance, is certainly the plain technological deployment of
>    the DNS, content centric networking, and the resulting opportunities and
>    evolutions in the understanding of the domain name nature, use, economy,
>    and impact on commercial, IPR, and societal usages.
>
> To address these needs, a clear understanding of the very technical nature
> of the Internet tool and of its cons and pros is necessary. We cannot
> object to politics if they do not understand the internet nature when they
> discuss SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, HADOPI, etc. legislations and act as if we are
> actually no better than them.
>
> The IUCG is certainly the best place to discuss and document the Internet
> as a global and coherent system, under the control of engineers, in a way
> that civil society and decision and lawmakers can understand and master it.
>
> Help would certainly be welcome, in every language that governments and
> users use, as documented in ISO 3166.
>
> The best way to join the IUCG and to help us (me) is at
> http://iucg.org/wiki/
>
> jfc
>
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