April 30, 2006

Gettin' Down and Dirty

I'm sitting here in the heat of the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas getting ready to do battle with SIP based VOIP devices here at the iLabs

It's always amusing to me to see the great banners describing how this Po-Bah CEO or that is going to reveal how the internet is going to evolve.  What Palantirs do they have in their corporate towers?  Or are they simply reflecting some marketing hype that is as grounded in reality as the "science" of geo-phrenology.

For several decades I've been getting down and dirty with internet technology, often here at the show.  And our work here is not easily characterized as trivial - relatively few enterprises have a larger or more involved, or technically advanced, infrastructure.  Nor are there many networks that go forth and intentionally try to push beyond common practice and push multi-vendor and multi-protocol interoperability.

When I engage in discussions of internet governance I find that the majority of the people involved have, at best, a tenuous grasp of the technology they are trying to regulate.

Which makes me wonder how many of our conceptions of internet governance are filled with as much ungrounded techno-fantasy as the trade-show keynote speech predictions of corporate CEOs.

Posted by karl at April 30, 2006 9:46 PM