I attended the IET and BCS Turing Lecture at the Royal Institute on the evening of 23rd February in London, where Dr. Robert Pepper of Cisco gave a lecture on the “Paradox of the Internet”
Prior to the start of the lecture, the nephew of “Alan Turing”, Mr. Dermot Turing gave a brief overview of his trust, which recycles our domestic or corporate computers for use in less privileged countries for education.
Dr. Pepper recounted the early days of Internet (including a Jon Postel photo next to a whiteboard of DNS early domain architectures) and an intellectual comparison of the old PSTN days of control metrics (call length, distance) versus the openness of the Internet as we know it today.
The “Paradox theme” of the lecture refers to the threat to the current Internet wide Eco-system of academia, businesses, vendors, service providers, governments utilizing a de-centralized open distributed system and the threat of more legislation through government lobbying for a lot more “command and control” of the Internet due to concerns on security and safety.
An interesting view on open policy and the history and efforts of a global community to maintain that openness of contributions, you can listen to the recorded session here
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