[extropy-chat] Agreement on principles. (was Microsoft)

[KAZ]

----- Original Message ----
From: Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org

 
> It is often said that the Internet is one of the best success stories of anarchy 
> or, even, socialism in modern history. 
 
It'd only be an example of the success of anarcho-capitalism.
 
Certainly not socialism. When a government accidentally creates something it doesn't like and abandons it, then it's taken over by random private individuals, that's not socialism.
 
The original point of the internet was to create a government intelligence network which could survive, say, a nuclear war, because it was decentralized.
 
But the internet proved ineffective for this, which is why emphasis was gradually shifted to more secure, controllable alternatives.
 
I'm sure a few of the people here remember how, in the late eighties and early nineties, there was all the whining and crying about how the net couldn't possibly be funded and expanded sufficiently to keep up with its own growth. The very sort of people errantly demanding compliance with standards too inferior to win majority support on here were, back then, saying "we have to ban binaries on the usenet, we need to force this standard and that for lists, servers, gopher, because otherwise bandwidth will be consumed and the things which are REALLY important...as defined by arrogant and unimaginative we...will be squeezed out".
 
They screamed and cried that Mosaic, and eventually netscape, were evil because they supported graphics, which were not necessary for sgml-driven data webs, and did not "pay for" the bandwidth (by the amount of information delivered) the way text did. "EEEvil! Sound the Conch!"
 
Fortunately, they were largely ignored, or better still laughed off-stage, and as the bureaucrats who funded the 'net "wisely" abandoned it for alternatives, the free market took over and proved that we could have oodles of /excess/ bandwidth despite usage being literally thousands of times greater than the amount they black-sky predicted was the amount that would bring even Mighty Government Funding to its knees.
 
Ironically, you still here nonsensical echos of this, today.
 
Like people saying "You can't have a four line quote header, because you're reducing effective bandwidth!"
 
/snort
 
Yeah, we're SO short of bandwidth, these days.
 
> The Internet has proven itself to be an example of cooperation between 
> countries, (often-competing) commercial entities, government agencies, 
> and educational institutions for the sole purpose of enhancing communication. 
 
BZZZZZ
 
Wrong.
 
The primary driving and funding force behind the Internet is selfish quest for gain. That's why it's doing so well.
 
> Yet even this loose cooperative requires some central administrative authority 
> for such things as operational guidelines, protocol specifications, and address assignment.

BZZZZZZZZ!
 
Strike two.
 
This is the same silly argument you hear for government coercion on so many fronts...but of course the very reason used to justify it, the importance of the resource in question, is precisely why there is ZERO need for "authority" in it. 
 
Because people, not being "led" by some dubious authority, aren't going to throw up their hands and give up on the thing they want.
 
They're going to make sure, themselves, that it's delivered. And they're going to do, of course, a far better job than any useless bureaucrats.

> The key to the success of communication over the Internet is the use of 
> a standard set of protocols, based on TCP/IP. 
 
BZZZZZZWAHAHAH!
 
No, that's just a cosmetic technological aspect. If the precise ones being used ceased to exist tomorrow, and no authority were set up to coerce people into using some other one, people would begin throwing their own together, and competing protocals would quickly evolve into /spontaneous/ standards, which of course would work better than anything some committee of bureaucrats could ever dream up.
 
Ironically, the natural standards would also be more dynamic. "standards" agencies tend to create stagnancy.
 
Essentially, the difference between China inventing gunpowder, noodles, the printing press, and modern steel and Europe turning them into USEFUL technology was one of China being run by a great big IETF, who enforced the "standards" of Chinese civilization, keeping it all nice, orderly, and stagnant.
 
> Again, I'm sorry you choose to stick to a broken system.
> This behaviour you describe is unacceptable, but I'm not
> responsible for a broken implementation, and I won't sign
> inline for unrelated, technical reasons.

The "broken system" is that of sticking blindly to what some bureaucrats announce, even when the marketplace has pissed all over it and moved on.
 
You might as well sign one of those online resolutions to turn off images in Mosaic. To save bandwidth for its real, text-based use.
 
I wonder...WERE you one of the guys complaining about Mosaic, saying a lynx/gopher type was better for the net's limited bandwidth potential?
 
Or did you turn into a fuddy-duddy with age?
 
--
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