At 8:13 PM +0300 4/25/01, Sampo Syreeni wrote: >On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: > >>I think this may be one idea for which you don't want credit. > >Actually it's one that's been implemented. The problem is, those perverters >made their Net such a fun place *everybody* wanted part of it. > And the proposal brings up (again) the interesting issue of just what "the Net" is: -- is it a physical thing, like a piece of property? -- is it a "public accommodation," like a public highway? -- is it a collection of mostly privately-owned fibers, cables, and switches, with users contracting to carry packets over parts of it? -- is it a set of protocols, e.g., TCP/IP and suchlike? -- is it some "cyberspace," evocative yet nebulous? In my case, I pay for my telephone line (no DSL yet, and I don't have cable) and I pay a company in Santa Cruz, my "ISP." They have arrangements they made with upstream providers. So when I send packets, they travel in contractual ways. Maybe to lne.com, maybe to yahoo.com, maybe to foreign sites. In what sense would it be meaningful to talk about "creating alternative nets"? I would still telephone my ISP, he would still use his T1s and T3s and the like to communicate with other machines, etc. Is the proposal that I would use _other_ physical cables, fibers, etc.? Obviously not. That is too bizarre to even consider. Is it then that I would somehow be told I could not use TCP/IP protocols, that I must use "alternate protocols"? Or is, as the only thing I could see that could even remotely be implementable, that certain users might have their packets tagged in some way, or that they be "forced" to use encryption in certain ways. So instead of Cypherpunks choosing to encrypt all of their communications to each other (major problems here, but that's another issue), some sort of Authority would require, say, the "perverts" and "seditionists" to encrypt everything to some encryption protocol that only other members of the mandated "PervertNet" and "SeditionNet" could view. Nothing else makes sense, as the phone lines and T1s and fibers owned by Sprint and WorldCom and Cable & Wireless are already there and essentially "must" be used. (And there are property issues, of course.) (By "must" I am _not_ saying that Alice gets to claim some "right" to use a T1 between Santa Cruz and San Jose simply because it's _there_ and she cannot afford to string her own T1 over the mountain passes. More the point that someone built and paid for that line, and that if they wish to sell packet space to Alice, through contractual/ISP arrangements, it is no business of anyone to tell her that she must build her own separate infrastructure.) Crews has not thought very deeply about the issues. He acknowledged in the article that he is not a technical person. And he admitted: "Even Crews admits that he hasn't worked out the logistics or a clear-cut definition for what he envisions. But like a true visionary, that hasn't stopped him from pushing the idea." Well, it doesn't require someone to be knowledgeable about the guts of Linux or TCP/IP or whatever to see that the idea of a "PervertNet" or a "SeditionNet", mandated by the state, is unworkable for several very good reasons. Which is not to say that "PervertNets" are not possible, or not already in operation. In fact, porn-trading networks are already out there. Even child porn rings...many news stories about these things. And mailing lists, Web chat rooms, IRCs, etc. are quite clearly examples of ""virtual communities." Another name is "intentional communties," as in gate communities, private clubs, etc. (Crews needs to get up to speed on this stuff before he starts recommending policy for Cato! He might want to read my own "Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities" paper, done for the Imagina conference in Monte Carlo in 1995, and since reprinted in several places and (still) available on the Web via search engines.) Crews is taking the Good Idea of self-protection and self-selection and perverting it into a mandated (one assumes, else the "idea" is just rehashing existing things) ghettoization. I expect that he will probably come around and will say that intentional communties was all he was ever suggesting in the first place. Well, we've had them since the start of the Net, back in the late 60s, early 70s. And before. The more things change.... --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
