The following text is copyright 2003 by Network World, permission is hearby given for reproduction, as long as attribution is given and this notice is included.

Looking forward by looking backward

By Scott Bradner

What will you think were the big Net-related stories of 2003 looking back at it a year from now? I'm not sure they will be much different, other than in degree, than the major stories of 2002. The copyright mafia will continue to strive mightily to make all of modern technology into a glorified CD player; courts and governments will continue to try to make the Internet into a global force while, at the same time, trying to compartmentalize it into national or sub-national chunks; the traditional telecommunications forces, including standards organizations, regulators, carriers and equipment vendors, will continue to try to protect us from the unpredictability of Net-based services; and the cops will continue to see the Net as a system for gathering data on citizens.

It is possible that the election-forced changes in the U.S. congressional-lackeys will change the fortunes of the copyright industry but I doubt it. So far, whoever congress is working for, it is hard to see any hint that it includes the consumers of copyrighted material - you know, the people that would like to be able buy something like a CD or record a TV show and play the music or watch the show whenever and wherever they want to. It will be nice if the US Supreme Court slows down the rush to perpetual ownership but, even if they do, the industry will continue to fight to keep us chattel.

With Australian courts ruling that a statement on a web site halfway around the world could constitute libel in Australia, U.S. states individually outlawing spam and China mandating an Internet free of confusing, i.e. anti-government, opinion, it is ever clearer that the Internet presents a serious discontinuity for the word's laboriously accreted legal system. Will there be any one interested in civil liberties and individual rights involved as the system gets rebuilt?

I'm writing this while doing something that some regulators do not seem to think is possible. I'm listening to Internet radio (bluegrasscountry.org right now, khyi.com a little while ago). But some regulators seem to think that the Internet needs to get a QoS-injection to make this, and Internet telephony, possible. I've had occasion in the last few days to reread some of the pundit commentary from the mid 1990s. The stuff I read was full of the promise of ATM bringing QoS to data networks -- QoS that was needed before the Internet could become a success. In spite of better than 99% very high quality on the Internet radio and on the IP-based phone I also have at home, some folks, mostly those whose businesses are threatened by the Internet as it is, are pushing to get regulations to define IP telephony and to "make sure it is good enough" (as one regulator told me).

Far too many governmental authorities and law enforcement folks want to treat the Internet as a testing ground for the removal of all limits on personal privacy. They want to do things with Internet-based communications that would never be even thought about for other types of communications. If this is a prototype - we will soon be required to carry ID cards that broadcast our locations at all times and every word we say or hear. So much easer to protect our freedom this way.

Happy New Year?

disclaimer: It's accretion breaking time at Harvard, could be interesting but the above insincere New Year's wish is my own.