At 1:48 PM 4/10/96, Duncan Frissell wrote:

Well this is as good a time and place as any to ask the question that none of the opposition seems to have asked (perhaps because they don't know enough to ask): How do you force geographically dispersed nodes on a distributed network to adopt a set of officially mandated protocols?

But first a reading assignment: "How Anarchy Works--Inside the Internet Engineering Task Force" from Wired.

http://www.hotwired.com/wired/3.10/departments/electrosphere/ietf.html

I'd also recommend Michael Froomkin's article "The Internet as a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage," available at http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/arbitr.htm It gets into the nature of IETF-type stuff, especially vis-a-vis the difficulty jurisdictions have in enforcing parochial rules. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."