IOSC.LU: An afternoon with Vint Cerf.
Yesterday, I attended ISOC.LU's afternoon event with Vint Cerf. Actually, Vint was the second speaker: First, Latif Ladid gave a highly entertaining advocacy talk on the need for a transition to IPv6. One of the key points of that talk was the emphasis on an open, end-to-end Internet, as opposed to today's online world with with dynamic IP addresses, NAT, and similar evils. Vint's talk (the first part of which was not "corrupted" by Powerpoint slides ;) began with a short run-down of the Internet's history, starting in the early ARPANET days. Besides lots of nice anecdotes, his key point was once again openness: Keep the standards open, keep the uses open. Since this was an event organized by ISOC, he also elaborated on the things ISOC chapters could do. In particular, Vint mentioned policy development for the Internet, given that many governments and legislatures are currently making policy for an Internet they may not understand. ICANN and today's hard policy issues were only touched, though - they did not play a key role in either the talks, or the subsequent panel discussion.
Notes on the other event of the day, the Domain Name summit in Paris, can be found in Robert Shaw's blog.
