KoljaVerhage's Journal

For my first real Journal post I wanted to share some thoughts I had starting with an article I recently read about Jon Postel (https://www.wired.com/2012/10/joe-postel/). In 1998 he managed to get 8 of the 12 root DNS servers to reconfigure their servers to draw the addressing not from a government-backed server but from one that he helped run at the University of Southern California. As I understand the reason for his action was to show the US government that it could not take control of the internet from the open-sourced community of researchers who had built and maintained the internet since its inception. Jon stands as one of the founding fathers of the internet and internet governance. Thanks to his contributions and many like him, the internet is still not a place that can be unilaterally controlled by a government. Unfortunately he passed away briefly before ICANN was formed, of which he would have served as CTO. But ICANN still operates with many of the principles that he espoused. Initially I thought that these principles were under such heavy pressure, from both big tech companies and governments, that they were likely to buckle and "corrupt" the free and open core on which the internet was built. I feared that the US-China competition is such a high stakes game that the US government would not think twice to pull the internet more strictly under its own control, as fearful governments often tend to do. On the other hand, the big tech companies were also eager to claim full control over the entire stack of layers that constitute the internet infrastructure. But as I reflect on my prior thoughts I have come to let go of some of these fears. Taking a step back I've realized that government competition and powerful companies are not new phenomena. In the long development of modern telecommunications systems governance, which arguably started in 1865 with the founding of the ITU, the latest developments challenging telecommunications systems are merely blips. Whether it's the internet or pirate radio broadcasters, it is and will always be the free-spirited, libertarian and perhaps even anarchistic voices that are at the forefront of telecommunications innovations. In many ways I think the original founders of the internet foresaw all of these kinds of challenges and designed it to withstand just these kind of centralizing forces. The popular discourse is to speak of the internet as being able to withstand a "nuclear blast". But I think the real unique character of the internet is its ability to withstand "centralizing forces". The decentralized nature of the internet is so deeply ingrained in its architecture and its system administrators that there is no direct threat to its current decentralized shape. What should happen then is perhaps a return or a "rehash" of the decentralized principles. The Undead King has shown the appeal of building a religion and a church around centralization. But it's the Satoshi Nakamoto's, the Wozniaks and the Torvalds that have understood the true nature of the internet and through which we must shape the future course of the global extra skeletal nervous system.

-- KoljaVerhage - 29 Jan 2021