INET '93 Report

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

From: sac () apple com (Steve Cisler)

INET '93  August 17-20, 1993 San Francisco, California

By Steve Cisler, copyright 1993. Non-profit newsletters, BBSes,
gophers, and ftp servers may reproduce this report in full, including this
notice. It may not be posted on GEnie, CompuServe, Prodigy, Dialog,
America Online, or other commercial services without express
permission of the author.  <personal comments are in brackets>

Just over two years ago, at INET '91, the formation of The Internet
Society was announced. In 1992 INET was held in Kobe, Japan, where
new networkers were given training in a pre-conference workshop.
This year Novell and other groups helped bring about 125 people from
developing countries to a weeklong training session at Stanford
University prior to the INET '93 conference.

The Internet Society <isoc () isoc org> is growing more slowly than the
Internet. It has about 2000 members, primarily from the technical
sector. Dues at present are $70/year which equals the per capita income
of a few countries; the officers and trustees realize that this is steep, so
there may be various types of memberships later this year.  ISOC
depends on support from corporate sponsors, but it is meant to be an
enduser organization.  However, which endusers? students,
entrepreneurs, network administrators (one of the strongest categories
right now), government officials?

Apple Computer is supporting ISOC, as are firms such as U S West,
Microsoft, BBN, MCI, Novell, 3COM and non-profits such as the
Coalition for Networked Information, and a variety of government
agencies plus regional and national networks.  A small group met as an
advisory council and then with the trustees (elected) of ISOC to discuss
a variety of issues including membership, mission statements, finances,
and the need to have a permanent director.

VINTON CERF

<The person whose presence is felt in ISOC  more than any other is
Vinton Cerf. Rather than tell you about him, please take a look at the
large bronze statue that greets you as you enter the Internet.  Pause and
read the  inscription below the figure who is gazing skyward (at the
Internet growth charts), one foot on a router, his left hand grasping a
strand of optical fiber, and his right hand pointing toward the  horizon
where countries and counties are not yet blessed with Internet
connectivity.>

At any rate, on a serious note,Vint said that ISOC needs to decide what
it is and who it should serve.  The common denominator is that the
organization should keep its technical focus and that its relationship
with the Internet Engineering Task Force will continue to be primary,
that ISOC should not abrogate the principal that we build before we
standardize.  One challenge will be to explain to potential members
that ISOC is useful, is worth supporting. Some of us recommended
assembling a starter kit for new users, but there is so much information
available at low or no cost in print and electronic form that ISOC will
be hard pressed to have really unique reasons for joining. It already
runs a gopher (free), and publishes a newsletter
_Internet_Society_News_  in print for members with the electronic one
available to non-members as well.


The conference is not inexpensive, but the feedback I heard was that it
met expectations, especially when it came to mixing with many
different people  from all over the world. I would put that as the most
outstanding feature. The San Francisco Chronicle was indeed
impressed when it claimed that representatives from 725 countries
were present! Though the world is certainly fragmenting (as it gets
connected electronically), there were a paltry 91 nations present. I was
amazed to see the addresses that were now connected: Birzeit Univ.,
West Bank, Israel; Baku, Azerbaijan; Zagreb, Croatia; Quito, Ecuador;
Managua, Nicaragua; Luxembourg; Conakry, Guinea; Maputo,
Mozambique; and Estonia. A system manager from Papua New Guinea
told me his country was facing many challenges: more than 400
languages and a population "that came out of the stone age ten years
ago." Others, such as Chile, have two separate networks that
communicate with each other only the American NSFNet.

The conference took place in the Hyatt Regency on Market Street.
Rooms outside this hotel were much less costly, but the facility worked
fairly well for many of the meetings. A couple of the rooms had the AV
equipment quite far apart, and the audience had a hard time seeing. Bill
Yundt of Stanford, working with Russ Hobby of Univ. of California
Davis did a great job on installing a network with about 50 Suns, Macs,
and DOS machines. It was amusing to go in the first day and see many
more people tapping away at the machines than were talking with each
other. However, that changed, and soon the face-to-face conversations
were the norm, even as the machines were being used. There were a
few showcase machines to show off World Wide Web, Mosaic, Internet
Talk Radio, MBONE video, Cornell's Digital Library and CU-SeeMe,
the low bandwidth video conferencing tool, and a rather interesting but
semi-stable hypertext interface to Ed Krol's book and other titles from
O'Reilly. The only real vendor, besides individuals pushing their own
product or agenda, was a bookstore called Computer Literacy. They did
a good business the whole time, showing how much we still depend on
traditional methods of information delivery.

The sessions were punctuated by long lunches and 30 minutes breaks.
This allowed more time for schmoozing. Unfortunately, some people
just read their papers which were in the massive proceedings. If you
have a PostScript printer you can ftp the program, abstracts of
complete papers from mordor.stanford.edu or  the ISOC gopher which
is found in the 'general' category of U.S. gophers. Some of the main
sessions and panels were broadcast via MBONE, but I was unable to
read the overhead slides because the camera was usually focused on the
whole stage and not jut the presenter or the graphics on the screen. I'm
sure the sound track was useful to those who could listen to some of the
sessions. Once the techniques are fine tuned, this really could cut down
on  some conference travel. The next step will be the presence of a video
connection in the hotel bar, so others can join in the socializing--where
the real deals are hashed out in many conferences.

There were numerous tracks as you can tell from the program.  I'll just
cover a few of the talks I attended.

KEYNOTE: JOHN YOUNG

John Young, Chairman of Smart Valley, Inc. talked about the NII and that
it was about values to real people, not about networks. He wants to
move services to people, not vice-versa. The government can articulate
the need, serve as catalyst and coordinator, support critical advanced
R/D programs, but the private sector should understand the markets.
He briefly mentioned the issue of the haves/have-nots, and then moved
on the 'impediments to the market-based model': monopoly local phone
and one way cable (though this has changed in the past week or so, and
a complaint about the 50 Public Utilities Commissions, all making their
own policy <Why doesn't he call it a 'distributed regulatory process'
and make it sound good?>. Young wanted a single voice for all the
private sector, but it's far too diverse to be able to agree on anything
very specific. Then he turned to Smart Valley, a local effort in the
Silicon Valley to push for retraining, competitiveness, and other new
projects (he claims they have 50 under way)that will make use of the
new communications technologies. He said that Pacific Bell will be
making a $40 million investment in broadband services, that ISDN will
be available 'everywhere' by the end of the year. At the same time
Pacific Bell tells us that 20% of the subscribers are on lifeline rates
(though some may be able to afford more), and a Japanese report says
that ISDN deployment is going far more slowly that expected. User
demand is not there. Smart Valley is a real focal point for the Clinton
administration, specifically the Dept. of Commerce. Our state is in the
worst shape economically since the depression, and a series of high tech
solutions would please many people in Silicon Valley and Washington.

COMMUNITIES, ELECTRONIC AND GEOGRAPHIC

I participated in a session on support of virtual communities. There
were four presentations scheduled for a 90 minute slot, and the
moderator didn't crack his whip and yank people off the stage.
Dewayne Hendricks of Tetherless Access Ltd (dewayne () netcom com)
talked about wireless networks in the context of community networks
(which I covered). Astrid Jenssen, U. of Oslo, discussed the uses of
computer networks for distance education. Terry Morrow, U. of Bath,
supports users of the ISI and Exerpta Medica databases all over the
U.K. and some Commonwealth countries. Given its popularity there
are surprisingly few email queries for help. Jill Foster, U. of Newcastle
upon Tyne, outlined the difficulties in building electronic communities
with the NISP/Mailbase project.

ON THE INTERNET NOBODY KNOWS YOU AREN'T AN EXPERT

Global Networks and K12 Education was a stimulating track. It was
chaired by Bruce Nelson, an education marketing manager for Novell.
<bruce_nelson () novell com> is chairing a preconference for K12 folks
at next year's meeting in Prague. Those of you outside the U.S. might
suggest a better name than K12.

Ken Klingenstein <kjk () spot colorado edu> is a man of many hats:
federal state, regional network, university, school district, and
community. The Boulder Valley Internet project is helping schools make
connections, develop curricula, and evaluate the impact of the new
services  in a three year project.  Ken advised people to approach
districts not just schools or individual teachers. In their project the
children are using the network very heavily. While some K12 supporters
believe that networking may be done incrementally, Klingenstein
recommended not using a BBS, or "value-removed interface". Limiting
teachers and students to mail-based systems such as Fido systems for
school hosts is too small a window on the word of networked
information. Unfortunately, most districts do not have a Ken
Klingenstein to bring together resources from the NSF and the local
university  (if there is one).

Klingenstein noted that the kids find that the network information is
more 'electric'. Many of us have noted this: people have undue respect
for digital information, and they tend to question it much less. When it is
delivered "fresh", i.e. weather maps, news items, an answer from
someone on the Net, many people do not question the content. Every
person and source can appear as expert. I think the information literacy
skills should be included in this project, but Klingenstein has not made
an attempt to involve school librarians who are just "into their card
catalogs", and going to the library and using print resources was a very
low priority for him. To him "Books are the same everyday." His
attitude as a leader is unfortunate because school librarians have been
some of the most enthusiastic participants in other K12 networking
projects such as the Texas TENET system. At any rate, it was another
sad example of the gulf between computer people, teachers, and
librarians.

His paper discusses a new project, a community network using the
infrastructure set up by the school district and run partly by the Univ. of
Colorado School of Journalism. Libraries and other civic institutions
will be supporting this effort. Boulder will then have four different
systems serving the public: TogetherNet, OneNet (both large FirstClass
BBS systems with Internet mail and Usenet), another, smaller BBS with
city information online, and the new one. I recommend his paper
because of his thoughts on sustaining K12 Internet projects beyond the
efforts of individual and enterprising teachers.

Bob Tinker of TERC <bob_tinker () terc edu> apologized for doing a
"Stand and Deliver" presentation. He told the audience to read the
paper, that he was going to give a different one. TERC is working on
student collaboration. Besides computer interfaces they have designed
an easy-to-build ozone meter for construction by science classes at a
cost of $300. They are working on another project with Haitian creoles
in Cambridge, MA, and in all of their work they are struggling to avoid
elitism. See his paper for a description of the Alice telecomputing
software for Mac and Windows. It is free to educators.

Peter Copen <pcopen () igc apc org> of the Copen Family Fund also
tried something different. First, he just gazed at us in the audience to
get a feel for who we were. Then he asked for us to find a stranger and
each spend a minute talking about our favorite teacher. I found that the
teachers favored by  a Nicaraguan women and I shared the similar
qualities, so we did not want to stop for Copen to continue. Nor did
anyone else. He pointed out that this exercise involves the learners,
wakes them up, and gets them excited about continuing--not just
listening to experts impart their wisdom. Copen has a number of
projects with 400 schools in 20 countries. He probably could entertain
people for a whole day.

Following this was a BOF (birds of a feather) session on K12. Nelson
discussed the Prague preconference. I suggested that we do something
radically different and not have just papers and presentations, if we are
serious about changing the way learning takes place in a networked
environment. So much planning is geared to traditional ways of doing
conferences, that it would be hard to change.

Although I have described the K12 session in some detail, there were 30
other sessions in the following tracks: network technology (security,
mobility, the next IP, routing...); network engineering (heterogeneous
networks, capacity planning, topology, and network operations);
application technology (how to build them, new tools, multimedia, and
collaborative software); user applications (global emergency
management, cyber-knowledge and information space, virtual culture;
policy issues (economics and global network policy); and regional
issues.

There were a number of sessions on social aspects of the changing
networks and the strange communities that are spawned. Amy
Bruckman <asb () media-lab media mit edu> spoke about gender
swapping on the Internet. Much of this takes place in multi-user
dungeons, or MUDs. There were 276 publicly announced MUDS in
April, 1993. Bruckman is the ArchJanitor of MediMOO, a MUD for
media researchers.  She described her unease at meeting genderless
characters on MUDs and talked about the how female characters are
often "besieged with attention." That is one reason participants of both
sexes change identity online: men may want more attention, and
women may want less. She also recounts the story of the British student
who poses as an American on British MUDs.  I have talked to an Indian
who is researching the number of non-Indians posing online as Indians.
What else will we swap besides race, nationality, and gender? I think it
would be great if more people took the role of an intelligent, open, good
listener. They could always go offline if that became too uncomfortable!

INDUSTRY PANEL Eight men from  a number of  organizations such
as 3COM, Sun, Farallon, Cisco, Novel, and ISOC.  Without
attribution, I noted:

-huge growth in private networks

-where is the central governance for the network to thrive?

-customers want the connectivity of TCP/IP, but there is not enough
security or administration to satisfy many private firms.

-the next generation of users won't care about how it works; they will
want applications. Organizations will have to cease looking in because
the secure walls prevent many from networking outside.

-the new networks will cut distribution middlemen for electronic
products. Libraries, video stores, book stores, wholesalers will have to
change.

-Cerf said that the growth of the Internet was necessitating changes.
It's like trying to change a rocket engine in mid-flight!

-the net is effective because there is no meter running. Will there be
some tax? How will we shape it? Cerf called for a Boston T1 party, if
that happens. Flat rate pricing has been extremely effective, but with
video applications where a best effort attempt to get the packets
through the pipe is not enough, you may have a new tier of pricing
("Pay this price and we guarantee all your audio and video will be
delivered.")

-it's easier to make a business case for delivering entertainment. It is
much more quantifiable than other productivity applications on the
network. That is why it will be important in driving the transactional
use of the net.

-the Internet will be used for signaling but not for entertainment; it
doesn't have the capacity. Cable and telcos are going to do this. <In the
week since this was stated, Continental Cable and AT&T announced
new Internet services for all customers.->

-the Internet will still be the first place a lot of applications will be
grown and tried. Then they will migrate to the business world.

CONFERENCE ENTERTAINMENT: NERDS CAN DANCE

Lunches were light, perhaps to keep people awake in the afternoon, or
to leave room for the food and drink lavished on the attendees in the
evening. A San Francisco Bay cruise and wine tasting (some very nice
vineyards poured some excellent varietals) was upstaged the next
evening by a party in a city square. Somehow, the hotel had permission
to fence it off and hire a cohort of young men from Gold Gym to keep
the hungry and homeless from competing for the food and drink.

There were four different cuisines, a dessert altar, and wonderful
entertainment. I kept wondering what the gentleman from Tanzania or
the woman from Peru thought as a campy accordion band played a
rousing rendition of "Louie, Louie". One woman made the rounds to
exhort wall-flowers to get on the dance floor.  "I want to show them
that nerds can dance!"  It was an astounding party.

FRIDAY SESSION: MIKE NELSON (OSTP) & ROBERT METCALFE
(INFOWORLD)

Mike Nelson spent the day before his talk attending the sessions, so he
had a feeling for what the issues were for many attendees. Nelson
described the Information Highway Onramp program. In 3-4 years
ever school should have "a" computer hooked in. We need policies to
encourage the public sector to invest; to promote competition; to
re-examine what universal access means. He saw the NII as a vehicle
for US companies working with foreign companies to develop and
share new products. He also wanted to continue some of the programs
that the NSF has sponsored to open up connections with Latin America,
Africa, and eastern Europe. Nelson's task force will be looking at global
issues and be aiming at a single world network. No details have been
worked out.

Bob Metcalfe Publisher and CEO of InfoWorld called his talk "What if
there were PC's  on the Internet?" Some of us thought we was joking,
but no, he did not think many personal computers were really on the
Internet. We wondered where he had been these past few years and
why he was unaware of the flourishing PC applications for using the
net. He said the Internet users were a pampered elite, that it should let
go of the Unix mindset, and make the Big Move. He used Novell as an
example of a firm that knew how to supports its networking products.
<Indeed, they do have a network manager certification program that
has trained thousands of people, but earlier in the conference they were
appealing to ISOC to work with it to make the training platform
independent and to take over the burden of an overly popular program.
I don't think that ISOC is interested in doing this; most Internet people
do not get their validation from a certification program.>

Metcalfe loved to be provocative, as you can tell. He was touting ISDN
which he just installed in his home. He advocated implementing billing
with a packet/mile type of charge. He loved talking about the vitality of
the commercial market and how Bill Gates and Ray Noorda should
have been on the panels. Interop was the place to be (it followed on the
heels of ISOC the next week), he said. The government should have no
role in the Internet; leave it to market forces. <He sounded like he was
in training for Rush Limbaugh with a few telephone companies
whispering in his ear. With his disdain for government involvement I
am sure he will refuse to fly  into any airports where those pesky FAA
air controllers are meddling with the planes right to land anywhere and
anytime.  And I'm sure he will ask InfoWorld to give up its second class
mail privileges, or even deliver all it's mail via FedEx.  Let market
forces prevail!>

The moderator would not let Metcalfe get away without a few
questions from the audience. Laura Breeden said that when the market
is left to its own devices for entertainment the most popular cable
events are mud wrestling and tractor pulls. How would he solve that?
No real answer.  And how about support for schools and libraries in this
networked environment? Again, the mantra: market forces.

Vint Cerf jumped up; he wanted to defend the Internet and ISOC. He
paced and gestured, and persuaded Metcalfe to join on the spot. Money
was exchanged, then a hug, and loud applause. Cerf has a way of
turning charged events into something very beneficial. Now it's time to
educate Metcalfe and hear more of his ideas.

POST SESSIONS: AFRICA; INTERCULTURAL ISSUES

The Africa BOF drew about 50 people in a room that was meant for 25.
<We kept shifting the seats and the tables, and I thought of the 1895
conference in Berlin when the European powers shifted the map of
Africa into a pie of colonies. The representatives from each country
began to describe their networks, country by country, in some detail,
starting from South Africa. This was the kind of information that can be
compiled for the next meeting in 1994, using the network, so that the
discussion can be used for organizing issues and not long narratives.
Because I had been listening for so long and still had one more meeting,
I left about the time they had finished Mozambique. >

Howard Rheingold, Brewster Kahle (WAIS, Inc.), Lee Felsenstein
(Interval), and I were invited to share a few thoughts on inter-cultural
networking issues with a group of Japanese who had attended INET
'93. It was organized by Izumi Aizu of the Institute for Hypernetwork
Society.  Most the attendees talked about the effect of the Internet
connectivity and information sources on relations between Japan and
the US. We also had input from the head of the Croatian and Slovenian
national networks. Howard Rheingold talked about the effects of
virtual communities and the challenge of setting behavior expectations
in new environments. Also discussed were the compromises in Unicode
that has upset many Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. I spoke about the
use of telecomms technology to preserve culture and said that many
cultures may resist Internet connectivity because of the threats it poses
in some people's minds.

Brewster Kahle of WAIS, Inc. said it's time tool builders began to think
about how their systems will play in other cultures. Bernard Aboba,
University of California, talked about friends whose lives were being
disrupted (mental harassment, loss of job) by false accusations
broadcast anonymously from Finish anonymous mail servers to
American mailing lists, BBSes, and Usenet groups. There is no way to
trace the perpetrator, even though they believe they know who it is.

Izumi wrapped up with a plea not to have either the US or Japan waste
its resources building an infrastructure just to compete with the other
country. He said the Japanese are very worried by the intense effort of
the Clinton administration, which in turn, uses the specter of massive
Japanese information infrastructure investment to line up supporters in
the business community and Congress. <It reminds me of the methods
used by both the American and Soviet military establishments to justify
huge 'defense' expenditures that resulted in an arms race both America
and the former USSR are still paying for. >

The Internet Society Address:

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Steve Cisler                       
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