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Stephen Wolff I was responsible for building NSFNET and
seeing that it operated. This was done primarily through a cooperative agreement with University
of Michigan, the state of Michigan, IBM and MCI. They provided a nationwide network that
was, for the time period, very advanced and very fast and in the end linked up almost
every major university in almost every state in the union.
The memorable moment for me, the one that the told me that the Internet had really caught
on a happened actually much later in the mid ’90s - after I had left NSF and was working
for another company. I had a t-shirt from Carl Malamud, who was one of the pioneers
on Internet Radio, and I was wearing it and out for my noontime run at lunchtime at work
and there were a bunch of elementary school kids who were coming back from some sort of
tour or another and as I ran by, one of them called out, “Hey look! That guy's got a
URL on his back!” And I thought, hmm, now it’s really caught on.
The weather analogy is turbulent. And that’s not bad; that’s a good thing. Anything that
is vital in living and growing is always going to be turbulent. It is going to be going often
in many directions, several of which are bound to be wrong, some of which are going to be
right. I think the Internet is still a work in progress and that's a very good thing.
My concern is the same as many people’s, that somehow the Internet will cease being
the open edge-governed organization that it is today. The governance of the Internet is
distributed, it is plural, it is pluralistic, it is multinational and that's a wonderful
thing. I would hate to see the governance of the Internet concentrated in the hands
of anyone or even a coalition of governments. It is not a government operation. It is a
people's operation. The Internet Society has it right, I think, the Internet is for everyone
and everyone needs to be apart of the governance.
I look to the continued leadership of the ISOC. I think Internet Society is, in the
way is constituted, the way it is husbanding the activities of the IETF, it’s a very
good thing. I look forward to that continuing and continuing the ISOC stewardship of governance
procedures and governance concerns for the Internet is a good thing.