[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Village Voice article irresponsible journalism?

[ronda@ais.org (Ronda Hauben)]

>Week of April 4 - 10, 2001
>Paul Garrin Says Monopolies Choke the Web. Now Congress Is Starting to Listen.
>Casting a Wider Net
>by Sarah Ferguson

(...)


>From the moment the U.S. government moved to privatize the Net back in
>1995, handing Network Solutions a lucrative contract to administer the
>.com, .org, and .net domains, critics have questioned why this "truth" has
>to be so narrow. Why should one company have the right to charge people
>premium rates-at that time $100-to sign up for Web suffixes devised when
>the Net was still a Cold War military and education project? Why should an
>aspiring artist have to scrap to be www.sculptor.com when she could just
>as easily be www.erotic.sculptor or www.heavenly.form?

(...)

The Internet is *not* a "Cold War military and education project".

It is the result of scientific research to make technical communication
and resource sharing possible across dissimilar networks
under different political and administrative control, networks
that were very different technically as well.

The DNS was *not* intended as a directory system.

It is being used for a function that it was never intended to 
serve and can't serve.

Those who are exploiting the current problem for their own
self benefit are not helping to understand or solve the problem.

Just as in the telephone system there has been a need for directories
to serve a directory function, and that the telephone numbers
couldn't be made to serve that function, so with the Internet,
it is not to try to make the DNS serve the need for a directory
function.

It would be good to see more responsible reporting in the Village
Voice of this problem so that the public is educated.

Ronda
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/birth_internet.txt
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/centers-excellence.txt


_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold