Subject: Innovation Extermination Task Force

From: Bob Allisat <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 17:29:09 -0500 (EST)

Mohsen Banan, in his excellent article comments:
> Now, we just have got to leave behind those who after all of this, still
> don't get it and can't (or don't want to) follow...

Randy Bush says:
$ this discussion lacks a certain basis in reality.  or maybe i just don't
$ understand it because it's origins were from the crazies from which
$ procmail protects me.

Dave Crocker concurs: 
# listening only to those who agree with you is not a very useful approach
# to debate. in any event, if you wish to pursue something other than an
# unproductive  philosophical debate (some would say, attack) then you 
# need to formulate and propose a work plan, and garner sufficient
# community support to ensure that there will be a significant group to
# do the development and a significant group willing to deploy the result.

 First let me say I am in complete agreememt with Mohsen and
 am entirely supportive of his imaginative approach to problem
 solving. The responses of Bush/Crocker are reactionary and
 display a staggering degree of arrogance and narrow mindedness.
 Behaviour, in my opinion, unbecoming of alleged engineers.

 We must, at long last, step around the many obstructions in
 the way of Network evolution. We the people should simply route
 around the many blockages, most of which are not technological.
 The bottlenecks and clots we are experiencing arise from pre- 
 dominantly American restrictions & politically and commercially
 motivated goals which force us into unnecessary limitations and
 socially normative cul de sacs of which the present Domain Name
 Wars or Wars of Internet Governance are just two prominant examples.
 We the people *can* and *do* innovate. The IETF and their simple
 crowd can't. Interesting, eh?

 As Mohsen mentioned the integrity and universality of the blessed
 namespace will be preserved by sheer necessity. It is essentially
 in all of our interests to preserve a common map (so to speak). In
 order to be locatable as individuals or businesses we must know
 where basically anyone else is as well. It will all take care of
 itself with proper planning and effective execution as Mr. Bahan
 wrote.

 On a more disturbing note, one must ask oneself why the resistance
 to even discussion of these ideas? Both Bush & Crocker, as very
 highly connected within the IETF/ISOC orthodoxy, in commenting
 negatively are basically attempting to kill Mohsen's ideas before
 they have even been discussed or developed. Unfortunate and more
 evidence of the concretized and intransigent politics of this
 allegedly empirical forum. Crocker and Bush objections are political
 and probably financial and must be identified as such. 

 Attempts to squelch discussion/debate filters out just the innovation
 and evolution this allegedly international network allegedly thrives
 upon. Boarding up the windows does keep out the lunatics, theives and
 other bad guys. It also has this tendancy to shut out the sunshine,
 blue skies, sights of the seasons changing, any contact with neighbours
 or connection with the weather and so on and so forth. The IETF crowd,
 in it's collective old age, appears to have gone a triffle paranoid and 
 a tad xenophobicif the opinions of Crocker/Bush actually hold as much
 sway as they believe. We'll have to route around these old farts just
 like all the other rapidly aging and hopelessly suffocating obstructions
 in the path of Internet evolution.

 Bob Allisat

 Free Community Network _ [email-masked]
 http://fcn.net _ http://fcn.net/allisat
 http://robin.fcn.net