[ih] Who was behind the curtain? [was: patents and public stewardship]

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 05-Feb-24 09:47, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> On 2/4/2024 12:35 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> Was all that effort across many different organizations planned and
>> coordinated?
>> ...
>> But was there some "GIP", or "Government Internet Plan" that drove all
>> of the decisions made within organizations such as ARPA, DoD, NIST,
>> NSF, et al and acted as a "Plan B" to the GOSIP vision?
> 
> I was not in the middle of TCP's creation or development but was around
> some early 'promotion' activities and latter 'solidifying' activities.
> CSNet > NSFNet early, and then commercialization later.
> 
> My impression is that there was never an integrated 'government' plan',
> but rather there was a set of distributed efforts by various folk  --
> some within the US government and some not -- making independent decisions.
> 
> It's not as if people didn't know each other, but from my relatively
> outsider vantage point it felt much more like incremental adoption of
> complementary goals.  Individuals in different positions seeing an
> opportunity to make something useful happen and taking that
> opportunity.  Both with the underlying tech and with operational
> deployment and use of it.

Yes. But IMHO it was driven by *need*. From the viewpoint of a
foreign observer, BITNET (yes, I know it didn't start out over TCP/IP),
CSNET, NSFNET and ESNET were driven by immediate needs, while GOSIP
was nothing but a promise.

Jack also asked:

>> Now that the Internet long ago grew beyond its role as a DoD Experiment, 
>> I wouldn't expect pieces of DoD (such as DCEC) to be responsible for 
>> "making the Internet happen".   It's a global and international task 
>> now.  But who inherited the role to make the Internet happen?

I think a number of those people are here. Internationally, the
answer was the same: universities and research labs needed a solution,
and OSI was still imaginary. At least in my little corner of the universe
(CERN, 20 years before anyone even heard of the LHC) it was need. We had
users in hundreds of universities round the world requiring vast data
transfers and effective communication. People like Vint and Larry
Landweber were promoting the technology, and we self-organized to
turn it into a network. Coordinating committees, engineering
planning groups, and a regional registry, were created because they
were necessary. RIPE wasn't official when it was created.
(https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/RARE-TCP-IP-report.txt)

And IBM donated links that were allowed to carry IP. That was
more important than many people understand.

Then (greatly to my surprise) when we started organizing things
like the Geneva ISOC chapter, half the people who showed up
were trying to make money! That was new!

However, it was fundamentally an evolutionary process with very
little official input. Heck, the official policy at CERN (which
I wrote in 1985, darn it) was OSI. Five years later I was all
TCP/IP ;-).

The only thing that was really forced by government was the creation
of ICANN, which despite the magical thinking that John Levine
mentioned on another thread is basically a clerical service.

     Brian