Question: From a swinging voter: Before I vote for a candidate, I would need to know that the candidate would act responsibly on issues of conflict and debate. What do you think will be the most important conflicts in the future of the net, and where do you stand on them?

Nominee Replies

Sureswaran Ramadass - posted on 2000-10-09 03:18:54 Actually, there seems to be numerous major conflicts. These include IDNO representation, Better methods to domain name resolutions, new tlds... Each has to be studied with an interest to protect the common netizen better. Masanobu Katoh - posted on 2000-10-04 09:24:03 I interprete the conflict you mean as the potential challenge to the Internet in the future. As you can see in many of my speeches (please see www.mkatoh.net) I point out at least five challenges: (1) cultural and social challenge; (2) economic; (3) technological; (4) legal and policy; and (5) education and awareness. The digital divide, if any, is not only between the rich and poor, but between generations, genders, etc., too. I want to work on all these issues (not necessarily all through ICANN, though) to turn digital divide to digital opportunity. Johannes Chiang - posted on 2000-10-02 10:19:41 I have mentioned in my own web pages and also in the answers to previous questions about two kinds of conflicts. I called the first kind conflicts as Innovation vs. Standardization. This often occurs in the transition state as we are now being on the Internet and an instance for this is the conflicts between the trademark holders and the domain-name holders. The former group insists a kind of standardized rights and the latter insists their innovative ideas. My position while making decision is to figure out the approaches to speed up the transition without fluctuations to chaos. The second kind is emerging in Internet world, i.e. scarity and abandon. The problematics of IP allocation and bandwidth result from scarity. To this, I suggest on the one hand the fair distribution of current net resources and on the other hand identification and introduction of the next-generation IPs, e.g. IPv6 (enlargement), Mobile-IP (mobility) and MPLS (bandwidth and performance). Until now we have not started to think of the problems resulted from abandon. But we must prepare for the relevant conflicts will come. Abandon is not fully bad because it could push the ultilization of the net and then lead to more advanced technologies if we aim at a reasonable direction.