Dar folks,

I am surprised and somewhat dismayed that no one in “Civil Society” and @LARGEs seems interested and that no one is discussing the “W.W.W. 3.0” episode that is now developing. I name WWW 3.0 as the Whole World War at the “3.0” level that concerns us all. This episode is the attempt of the commercial funding (and not the ITU) to take over ultimate control of international standardization's future throughout and through the Internet standardization process (IAB/IETF/ISOC), reversing its documented position in RFC 3869 and 3935 and hijacking innovation trends (the "3.0" coming layers).

1.       Why do I talk of “commercial funding”?
 
Because the IAB warned us of the danger that we are facing and explained how to avoid it in RFC 3869 (Aug. 2004) and neither Governments, nor Civil Society or International Organizations, did anything about it. Only a small kernel of us tried to do something.
 
In Aug. 2004, the IAB stated: “The principal thesis of this document is that if commercial funding is the main source of funding for future Internet research, the future of the Internet infrastructure could be in trouble. In addition to issues about which projects are funded, the funding source can also affect the content of the research, for example, towards or against the development of open standards, or taking varying degrees of care about the effect of the developed protocols on the other traffic on the Internet.”
 
This resulted from “the reduced U.S. Government funding and profit-focused, low-risk, short-term industry funding has been a decline in higher-risk but more innovative research activities. Industry has also been less interested in research to evolve the overall Internet architecture, because such work does not translate into a competitive advantage for the firm funding such work.” Therefore, IAB believed “that it would be helpful for governments and other non-commercial sponsors to increase their funding of both basic research and applied research relating to the Internet, and to sustain these funding levels going forward.”

•  In Tunis the world’s Governments left the US Government to take care of the Legacy Internet and did not get themselves involved in the emergence of any architectural research.
•  The IETF did not participate in the WSIS nor get involved in the IGF.
•  Civil society non-commercial sponsors or helpers did not join our successful efforts (so far) at the IETF:
  •  To protect languages and cultures from engineering and business control.
  • Introduce a civil society technical place at the IETF (the Internet Users Contributing Group)
  • To obtain the validation of an Intelligent Use (IUse) Interface (IUI) concepts.
•  We feel alone in creating the Intelligent Use Task Force (IUTF) to explore, document, validate, and deploy the people centric capacity demanded by the WSIS.

2.       Why do I use “3.0”?

This is because in a nutshell if “2.0” has now an accepted meaning, the 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 "notions" (i.e. all of what can relate to a topic) can be perceived as:

• “1.0” meaning: server centric monologue, and related
• “2.0” meaning: network centric dialogue, and related
• and “3.0” meaning: people centric polylogue, and related.

 So,

• “Master/Slave” initial Web connections are “1.0”.
• Wikis, AJAX, WebSocket, etc. are “2.0”.
• The Internet+, the IUI (intelligent use interface), Midori/Hurd (the Microsoft's and Stallman's expected replacements for Windows and Linux), etc. are “3.0.”

Another "technical way" to understand this might be, in strict, simple, and robust concordance with RFC 1958, which defines the internet architecture, to say that:

• 1.0 builds atop “plug to plug” hardware,
• 2.0 builds atop “end to end” software,
• and 3.0 atop “fringe to fringe” middleware.

 Two key points remain, however: what about “0.0” and “4.0” and exactly what is “3.0”?

•  “0.0” is everything that we do in order to communicate and understand information without digital tools in mind and that is generically called semiotics. “4.0” is what our brains do through digital semiotics that we can call brainware.
•  “3.0” is what RFC 1958 states that we must put at the fringe: network intelligent services. It is only some plugged layers on the user side (PLUS), extending the OSI communication model, along with its administration and governance. The “OSEX” model extended layers concern:
  • Security (and presentation in the Internet case).
  • Network services.
  • Interoperations between network applications and services

 In the users’ life, it should appear as personal distributed middleware empowering browsers (in computers, mobiles, tablets, appliances, TVs, houses, cars, etc.) with intelligent open services that are free to choose their reference providers. One may understand a person’s IUI as an “intelligent socket” system acting as private intelligent gateway network interfacing the OS of his/her machines and appliances in such a way that it makes that person the center of his/her freely selected worldwide digital ecosystem.
 
3.       Why do I use “Whole”?

This is because we do not discuss the Web or even the sole Internet any more. We discuss the whole digital ecosystem (WDE), i.e. all the physical or logical parallel interconnections to anything digital by our Intelligent Use Interface (IUI).
 
So, what is at stake is the whole digital ecosystem industrial pollution (and corruption) and biased innovation. How?
 
Through market driven commercially sponsored international standards, as was just explained by the IAB.
 
To understand why:

• a norm is the description of normality. Until now, norms were local (for a country) or professional (for a trade, skill, or task).
• Norms, therefore, opposed globalization. This is why the trend that is pushed by the commercial funding is to unify normality, i.e. to shape the world as a unique market.

Hundreds of wars and revolutions have failed to attain that target throughout history. Those who Richard Buckminster Fuller calls the "Grand Pirates" (in his "Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth") found a simpler way after WWI and WW II where they had lost control to engineers (from submarines and planes to the atom and computers): to recover control by using the common desire for international peace, human rights, democracy, etc. and the resulting needs for a better economy through a world market and rules.

These rules in technologies are “standards”. They say how to technically best build atop of norms. Therefore, they call for common uniform norms, and at the same time the international standards progressively shape a new “world normality” as, and for, a “common world market”.

This normality must be stable to protect market shares: as we know they call this stability the "status quo".

Disruptive and fundamental innovations become a risk. TMs and incremental innovation are tuned to keep consumers buying. However, incremental innovation must be based upon international standards protecting from a competitor’s breakthrough and have to be coherently ubiquitous to keep being accepted by the permanently reshaped customers (us).

Industrial evolution is only permitted after amortization and only if it increases benefits. However, this is not the lead-users’ (FLOSS, start-ups, user R&D, press) pace.

What the Web 2.0 already did to the Internet 1.0 has to be digested and reshaped in a commercially favorable landscape of WebApps: this is the task of the International Standardization and marketing consensuses. 

The IDNA2008 consensus and its progressive propagation throughout the protocol space (WG/Precis) shows the coming of the IUI 3.0 and of the Internet+ (tested by Google+) – whatever you want to call that Internet built-in trend – as ineluctable. The International Standards bodies are to confuse and delay its concepts enough for it not to become:

• An identified, independent, and acknowledged middleware standardization core area (IUTF)
• A people centric enhanced cooperation capacity for the internet, social nets, telephone, radio, TV, digital music, e-books, etc. polycratic stewardship.

 Multistakeholderism must stay among commercial leaders, not to extend to everyone, especially if Civil Society and ethitechnics (ethical considerations in architectural design) are involved.

4.       Why do I say “World”?

This is because this does not only concern the sole US market, or the Western developed countries market, or even the emergent countries (India, China, Russia, etc.), but rather everywhere. This results from the WWWeb e-marketing field of competition. All is market driven and the market is global. No one must be able to endanger the commercial leaders’ famous names and commercial rights anywhere in the world.

The strategy for years has been called “internationalization”: offensive business protection through the spread of the commercial leaders’ industrial technology supported by:

• favorable commercial conditions
• correlative identical local standardization
• permitted mass production increases, now on a multinational basis.

A well known example is the Unicode consortium’s (IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Oracle...) successful technical “globalization”:

• internationalization of the media (International English capacity to quote any string in any script, which does not fully support the languages that use the scripts), being the maintainer of the ISO 10646 standard.
• localization (local translation) of the English semantic, which does not support the various cultural semantics
• language tagging for technical, operational, commercial non-neutral filtering purposes.

This globalization is not a multilingualization that would set out to technically treat and culturally respect every language and its orthotypography the same as English is treated.
 
4.       Why do I say "War"?

Because of:

1.       the TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) rules

The WTO rules do not permit a country to protect its people against a technology (or a TLD, as we see with Saudi Arabia and GAC protests) that is an international standard. 

http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/tbt_e/tbt_e.htm.

 

This is why the ultimate weapon to fight States’ Barriers to Trade is to erode the credibility of their legitimate policy objectives, such as:

the requirements for quality,

the respect of cultures and minorities

the protection of human health and safety,

or the environment.

 The war is then on the Governments and the slogan for the “market forces” is to protect ... Human Rights (through free speech in using international market standards, for example) against people's Governments.

 

One of the vectors is GNI ( http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/) where Microsoft, Google etc. decide on the people’s best interest and defend their rights. This is far from democratically transparent technical standardization and network neutrality. Certainly civil and human rights are to be defended, but is it up to technical standardization bodies to defend them? In confusing the issues doesn’t that harm the needed international standard technical credibility and lead to political restrictions affecting the free flow of information?

2.       The competition on us, the users

We (technical and civil society people) represent a real danger for industry leaders in being:

Uncontrollable international competition, potentially rogue, possible divergent definition of what is a “better” Internet (in RFC 3935 IETF Mission Statement).

Smart enough to introduce, propose, defend, and deploy more innovative and people centric architectural solutions (i.e. for a “3.0” information society that is "people centered, à caractère humain, centrada en la persona").

In the same way as the financial crisis is resulting from financially dominant people/entities (speculators and corporate interests), the international standardization mechanics is to protect market driven standardizing from lead users disrupting innovation.

5.       The strategic impact.

This battle is now conducted at the ITU, IAB/IETF, IEEE, ISO, Governments level.
 
This results in particular from the Dubai December meeting (http://world2012.itu.int/) that is to revise the International Telecommunications Rules ( http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/default.aspx). In this debate, commercial leaders plan to oppose and negotiate with States alone, since Civil Society is absent and users are represented by their Governments.

In the Internet case, the IAB and IETF Chairs (the IAB Chair is a Microsoft employee) have prepared a draft document putting the (now ISOC affiliate) IETF in the commercial leaders' orbit.
 
Being the facilitator of the Civil Society IETF [log in to unmask] mailing list and one of the bootstrappers of the “3.0” IUTF (Intelligent Use Task Force), I posed the question of us, the IUsers, of the non-consulted IUCG channel and of our emergent IUTF standardization pole and called for a WG/RFC3869bis (a WG dedicated to rewrite RFC 3869),

• To consensually adapt the description of the IAB/IETF position regarding the standardization referents (market or people, commerce or sustainable development), as we do not think that market and commercial interests can develop without the support of the end-users.
• To document what the IETF means in its mission statement of "influencing those who design, use, and manage the Internet for it to work *better*" and to protect us against the RFC3869 IAB identified threats of sole merchant sponsoring bias of the Internet R&D.

Our remarks have been acknowledged as part of the working file of the IAB (Track #202). We also maintain an information portal on the matter and our Civil Society Technical Rights in this area at http://iutf.org/wiki/Modern_Global_Standards_Paradigm.

The best place for debating and building up a Civil Society technical position that can really help as part of the IETF standardization process, at least to show that we actually feel concerned by the “constitution of the Internet” (the source code as documented by Dr. Lessig) is the non-WG (i.e. permanent) [log in to unmask] mailing list and helping us with the http://iucg.org/wiki site.
 
6.       A civil society ethitechnical doctrine
 
More generally, there is a need for Civil Society to have a technical doctrine or at least mutually informed presence. The reason why is that technology choices are not ethically neutral.

• As documented by the IAB RFC 3869, there are no technically rooted influences. They are commercial in the current episode, but they respond to (magnified) real political risks of influences. Civil Society has to make sure that the people’s best interest is the reference.
• Network neutrality is something difficult to enforce. The easiest way to get it is to get the technology designed in such a way that it is difficult or costly to not respect it (what is not the case today, but that a “3.0” evolution helps in making it very complex to filter the network).
• A multilinguistic internet (the cybernetic of all the languages and cultures considered as equal on the common network) is to be explored and discussed. This is a typical civil society concern and, moreover, the real issue is our (we the people) relations to mecalanguages, i.e. our own native languages as spoken by our machines and in our anthtropobotic society (“on the internet, nobody knows I am a dog” or a machine). We did start in France an effort in that area, creating the MLTF, participating with MAAYA (http://maaya.org) and ITU, UNESCO, SIL, Union Latine, Linguasphere, etc. This effort is to be resumed.
• The civil society has accepted a stewardship inherited from the “1.0” legacy. Experience has been gained during the last decade regarding the various forms of governance tools, stakeholders, etc. common decision/trend processes, etc. while the 2.0 evolution and the 3.0 preparation will make several of them obsolete.
• One of the major concerns, since it is traditionally a main part of the Internet Governance, is certainly the plain technological deployment of the DNS, content centric networking, and the resulting opportunities and evolutions in the understanding of the domain name nature, use, economy, and impact on commercial, IPR, and societal usages.

To address these needs, a clear understanding of the very technical nature of the Internet tool and of its cons and pros is necessary. We cannot object to politics if they do not understand the internet nature when they discuss SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, HADOPI, etc. legislations and act as if we are actually no better than them.

The IUCG is certainly the best place to discuss and document the Internet as a global and coherent system, under the control of engineers, in a way that civil society and decision and lawmakers can understand and master it.

Help would certainly be welcome, in every language that governments and users use, as documented in ISO 3166.

The best way to join the IUCG and to help us (me) is at http://iucg.org/wiki/

jfc