Question: In your opinion, what are the key technological & political reasons for the success of the internet (rather than other networks)? How do you see this situation evolving? What do you think will be the important conflicts in the future of the net, and where do you stand on them?

Nominee Replies

Johannes Chiang - posted on 2000-10-01 05:08:08 Internet is successful because it is a kind of open communication media just like the pocket-sized bibles after Guttenburg's basic invention. In general, the reason for the success of Internet lies in its button-up construction that makes anyone can connect to Internet freely. From technical view, Internet is build upon a scalable sets of convenient communication instruments in different layers such as TCP/IP, WWW,... I have rarely think about the political reasons. If there must be, I think it should be the decision making by government agencies not to control or loosly control the development of this information infrastructure. So, the net transits from ApaNet to NFS net and at last a net for free business and personal uses. I agree with what Prof. Ramadass described in a meta-level of problematics. In addition, I see a kind of conflicts caused by the transititon before my nose, viz. standardzation v.s. innovation, e.g. the confrontations between traditional and the new properties scuh as ID, Domain Name etc. I believe the potential conflicts will be related to scarcity and abandon. There is already a sign of conflicts in relation to scarcity, e.g. IP allocations and bandwidth. I have suggested that ICANN should identify and introduce innovative IP tech. and we could overcome these in a few years. I really hope that an ideal solution in relation to QoS/CIR could help to guarantee a minimal bandwidth for each one. Then, it comes the problems resulted from abandon. Abandon is not so bad because it could push the ultilization of the net and then the more advanced technologies if we aim at a reasonable direction. Sureswaran Ramadass - posted on 2000-09-30 04:51:14 A very broad ranging question. My broad ranging answer is that there will naturally be conflicts. Some of the areas of potential conflict are already addressed in the previous questions. Our job as ICANN directors would be: 1. Confer with Netizens as to their feelings on the issues. 2. Come to a consensus as to what to do next. 3. Carefully formulate and implement the decided strategy. The protection of ASIAN nations will be the first priority. Masanobu Katoh - posted on 2000-09-26 14:33:03 In my view the success of the Internet is its universal appeal to users-- easy to use, open to everybody, not expensive, compatible and interoperable with the systems you use. The future challenge is to manage these successful elements so that more and more people can use the Internet for a variety of purposes - commercial, information, communications, social, or cultural. In order to promote the Internet, we should keep it away from conventional regulations, yet we need some sort of order to assure confidence. For this purpose, we need a volunteer private sector driven structure where all stakeholders can equally participate. We need to conquer many impediments and challenges.