Ardan
join:2003-09-29
Rosemount, MN | Come on people The military and government wanted a means to be able to communicate after a nuclear war and they decided to research a possibility after the launch of Sputnik. It was not meant specifically for war at all, but for communication.
The US did make the internet what is and don't confuse the development of the internet with its applications. A European may have invented the WWW, but it uses the Internet. The stack everything uses to actually stay connected and communicate like we are was created by two Americans. The creation of the TCP/IP protocol was by far more important than the creation of the web.
How about FTP? If you read the RFC for it, you will see that it was first proposed as a file transfer mechanism in 1971 at MIT. Gopher was created at the University of Minnesota, USENET Newsgroups were created in 1979 by two Duke University Graduates and e-mail predates the Internet, having been used in mainframes in 1965 (yes, it does, don't argue that without looking first).
Regarding e-mail, the US Air Force was using an early e-mail system in 1969, with people in 1979 leaving messages on a central computer system instead. The ITU adopted X.400, but it was IETF that created SMTP before it broke off from the US Government to become and individual body in the 1990s.
Honestly, they have a right to be defensive about it. The whole world did a lot more to create the internet and aspects of it, eh? Sounds like American universities and a former US Government-funded organization did a whole lot more than what you think they did.
As it stands, I think its okay for them to maybe take over governance of aspects of it as long as its the ITU or someone not directly attached to the bloated main portion of the UN. I do not want the ITU to have control of the root servers, however, because they don't invite the ICANN to meetings and its obvious they won't let some of the core members of ICANN in to help. If you want a compromise, you have to actually compromise by letting them in on meetings and such, too :P.
I agree with everyone wondering if its necessary, because it clearly is operating normally. I'm talking about the core internet, not email spam. I'm sure someone will go there :P. Some of the people they lock out from meetings have had crucial contributions to the development of the internet and its applications, and have a track record of being very good in their respective fields. I do NOT want to let someone govern it when they pull something like that. That is just plain dumb. |
