Please keep our Internet simple
Via Ross Mayfield’s Weblog, a scary report on Verisign’s designs for the Internet:
Stratton Sclavos (Verisign CEO): We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge.
Every time I’m about to give up on ICANN (and long conference calls starting at 5 AM Pacific sometimes push me that way), I hear something like this to reassert the organization’s importance.
Painters buy white canvases for a reason. The Internet has succeeded as a platform for innovation because its architecture does not preempt its uses; instead, the stupid network offers a neutral background for line drawing, oil painting, and collage. Sure a grid on the blank canvas would help those making mechanical drawings at the right scale, but it’s just noise to the rest, who now need to paint an extra layer to cover it up. Complexity built into the network (such as a search engine that responds to every nonexistent domain name query) may enable a few uses, but it slows or breaks many more, and impedes the development of alternatives.
http://log.does-not-exist.org/elsewhere/001042.html
Wendy Seltzer gives the best explanation of the end-to-end principle (and its importance) that I’ve seen so far: Please keep our Internet simple….
Trackback by (void *) — December 15, 2003 @ 11:11 pm
It would be nice to hear your thoughts on the UN taking over ICANN’s job… sounds like a mess to me.
Comment by joe — December 16, 2003 @ 6:56 am
Painters Buy White Canvases for a Reason
Wendy Seltzer (pointing to Ross Mayfield) quotes Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos as saying, “We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge.” As even mid-level netheads know, this is the antithesis of the I…
Trackback by Freedom to Tinker — December 16, 2003 @ 1:40 pm
Keep It Stupid
Cory Doctorow: “When the CEO of Verisign says something as ghastly-stupid as “We have to move the complexity back into…
Trackback by vedana.net — December 17, 2003 @ 5:52 am
Verisign and Centralization
Ross Mayfield on why Verisign and Stratton Sclavos pose “a genuine threat to the very decentralized nature of the …
Trackback by Lextext — December 17, 2003 @ 2:10 pm
Some strange feeling seized me when I read your comment, guys.
Does guys’s post look strange here?
No. So guys, what is the point in your comment?
There always has to be some point.
Nothing personal tho.
regards,
Anderson
Comment by Anderson.J. — February 2, 2004 @ 11:57 am