User:Pleun/sdr/TalkAtTheWow

I want to tell you about a topic I'm interested in during my research project at the Piet Zwart Institute, in Rotterdam. I've been looking at points in history where government and citizen where in conflict with each other regarding the power over the internet for a while now in different projects.

One of them was my graduation project where I mapped a small part of the organizations involved in managing the internet in Europe, because of the Snowden revelations and the net neutrality discussions. I felt that there was a gap between what people thought the internet is and what is actually is.

It's a few years later now, lots of mapping projects have been done, that gap has narrowed a bit.

Now I'm actually more curious about the opposite. Can the internet actually replace a beliefsystem that because of secularisation is becoming less populair for decades? How can the web be seen as a metaphysical entity?

Meanwhile I was still looking at points in history where the internet grew out to be institutionalized, commercial, governed. Then I came across the story of one man I would like to share.

His name is Jon Postel, he was the keeper of the "adressbook" as I would like to call it of the internet. But that task soon became too big for one man. So the company "Network Solutions" was created to bare that task with him. But after a while Jon decided that Network Solutions and the government had too much influence and power and where making too much money. He decided to call 8 of 12 organisations that handled the adressbook and told them to configure their root servers to not pull adresses from Network Solutions, but from his own server.

Legend has it that it took two minutes before the officials where on the phone with his supervisors at the university and demanded for him to change it back.

In those two minutes, Jon Postel was the only man with all the adresses of the web. He was the man with ultimate power and control, the God of the Internet.

A few days later the White House revealed a plan to reorganize the way the internets directory system was governed. A few months later the man tragically died of a heart attack at the age of 55.

I want to light a candle for this courageous man who tried to and was so very close to keeping the power of the internet autonomous.