Ownership and mission of the internet

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Ownership and mission of the internet (12/06/05)

I recently finished reading Thomas Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization". In it Cahill makes the case that it is humanity's literacy and our stores of knowledge, only accessible by literacy of course, are what drives our civilization(s). it made me think about how things are now. Books, while still a central part of our lives, are now being replaced by an even greater store of knowledge, the Internet (hereafter referred to as the Net).

At the moment there is a bit of a tiff over ownership of the net, which surprised me as the owner seems quite clear. It is as if all the nations turned to Saudi and said "We're going to tell you who can and cannot use your oil". The Saudis would laugh! Regardless, the Net has become a global resource and is certainly one of our more important stores of knowledge. It only makes sense then, that the Net reflect reality so as to fully enable it's mission:

The distributed nature of the Net is central to it's design, as well as human society. It should be embraced and maintained, not centralized.
Countries should be free to participate in it's design and maintenance, but for the first time let's make sure it can serve all our needs, both in accessing information and preventing access. If countries choose to ban access to something, that is their prerogative much as it is with traditional media, and it will be the prerogative of the their people, and others, to treat that ban as they treat ones on traditional media.
The backbone on which this organized chaos depends will need to be able to support the breadth of our languages and abilities. That means Ipv6, Unicode domain names, and bringing order to the domain names.
1. It'd be useful if a country's suffix could be ignored in the country itself, much like how telephone area codes can be ignored in states with only one. That way everyone can have a .com, to be seen by his or her country folk, but also accessible to the world.
The open nature of opensource software makes it uniquely able to support this mission. SLAs and liabilities can be dealt with, though harder than with close source.
Attempts to change this should be construed and viewed as they are: an attempt to change humanity's greatest asset.

I'm awfully proud to work on the Net, and I know others are too. Our goals and hopes are important and real, but they are and should only be realized by working within our place in the framework of humanity.