Exploring the Internet
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My first face-to-face meeting with Tony, after countless e-mail messages, was in August when I took the train in from Paris and went to the twelfth floor of the ITU tower. As I got off the elevator, a short man with a beard darted in after me, posted a piece of paper in the elevator and jumped back out again just as the doors slammed shut.
This was Tony. He was trying to get into every elevator to post a notice of my lecture the next day. The lecture was news to me, so I read the notice. Along with the obligatory hype, the notice explained that I would be lecturing about a host of topics ranging from the future of networking in the civilized world to how more bandwidth would lead to world peace.
After catching the last elevator, Tony and I wandered across the street to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It is ironic that the acronym used by this global standards organization is a dyslexic variant of its real name.
ISO is a rather strange group. Unlike the ITU, ISO is a private organization. Like ANSI in the U.S., ISO's lack of real legitimacy to carry out its quasi-governmental functions makes the organization a bit insular and very conservative. Located in a squat, drab building, ISO occupies the dimly lit corridors of the third and fourth floors. The halls are almost always empty, but occasionally one can see a functionary dart out of one office and flit into another.
Tony and I wandered around the halls to find people to invite to my lecture. The purpose of our visit was to make sure everybody at ISO knew about the ITU experiment. I was a bit worried that putting ISO on notice would be considered confrontational, but Tony assured me that there was "nothing wrong with pushing forward the state-of-the-art a bit."
My lecture, by the standards of public bureaucracies, was a stunning success. Aside from the obligatory ITU contingent trying to figure out what their management was up to, there was a large crowd of functionaries from diverse UN contingencies interested in the Internet. Only a few people fell asleep, and a few even asked
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