Wetmachine

Last week was the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia (“the land of civilization, culture and enlightened thinking”, according to the official Web page). It has been reported that the conference was supposed to be about narrowing the digital divide. Croquet architect and all-around Computer God Alan Kay presented a model of the dynabook, er, $100 laptop to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, while his buddy Nicholas Negroponte presented one to the Pope. Picture here. (And there was much amusement in the Stearns household when we realized that this made me one degree of separation from Annan and two from the Pope.) A lot of world leaders were taking this theme very seriously, but I hear the conference turned out to be all about US control over the ICANN system for Internet domain names. Even more leaders were taking seriously this idea, as argued by countries like China and Iran, that the world can’t accept ICANN to be under the control of a rogue state that practices state censorship, executions, unilateral invasion, torture, use of chemical weapons, etc. President Bush chose not to attend, in order to that he might visit Asia and criticize China regarding human rights.

The ICANN flap is interesting in several ways. There’s the timely main story in the news about the relationship between the US and the rest of the world. Then there’s the timeless backstory about the idea that progress is not achieved by consensus or committee, but by someone actually doing something that works. That’s what the US did. We only got into trouble because it was successful. I’m fascinated by this idea lately as it relates to development within Croquet. It’s hard for people who feel excluded to do other than to demand sharing, and particularly hard for them to realize that nobody “anointed” the folks who are producing the stuff they want to be shared. People do stuff and it works. Then other people want it. The trick, if it were possible to optimize such things, would be to share when things aren’t yet working so that others might join in the creative fun. But too many cooks and the management cost of such “optimization” can easily spoil the soup. It’s a dicey thing. I know, because I’m on both sides of the problem right now.

But the most noteworthy thing of all, to my mind, is that the ICANN flap is all so unecessary. US officials say the current system works just fine, technically, and they’re sort of right, except that the rest of the world says it doesn’t, and they’re right too. But I think there’s a much better way to handle the mapping of addresses, which we’re currently trying to build out in Croquet. Whether we’re the ones to do it or not, there’s no technical reason that the whole thing can’t be done in a way that makes the whole political argument moot.

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