From owner-crackmonkey@zork.net Sat Mar 13 20:46:48 1999 Received: from zork.net (zork.net [209.0.51.129]) by hugin.imat.com (8.8.8/8.8.8/Debian/GNU) with ESMTP id UAA28613 for ; Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:46:47 -0800 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by zork.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) id UAA25076 for crackmonkey-outgoing; Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:31:58 -0800 X-Authentication-Warning: zork.net: majordomo set sender to owner-crackmonkey@zork.net using -f Received: from requiem.hip.berkeley.edu (requiem.HIP.Berkeley.EDU [136.152.77.66]) by zork.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id UAA25055 for ; Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:31:23 -0800 Received: (from schoen@localhost) by requiem.hip.berkeley.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) id UAA03535; Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:39:39 -0800 Message-ID: <19990313203939.A3505@requiem.geecs.org> Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:39:39 -0800 From: Seth David Schoen To: crackmonkey@zork.net Subject: [crackmonkey] Al Gore's "Internet History - A Retrospective" Mail-Followup-To: crackmonkey@zork.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.91.1 X-Uptime: 8:34pm up 19 days, 1:00, 12 users, load average: 1.36, 1.21, 1.10 X-Whereami: see http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/where.html Sender: owner-crackmonkey@zork.net Precedence: bulk X-Alternate-URL: http://www.zork.net/cit/ X-OS-Rules: Linux Rules X-OS-Sucks: Windows Sucks Status: RO Content-Length: 24514 Lines: 470 White House Al Gore Request for Comments: 3000 Office of the Vice President Category: Informational April 1999 Internet History - A Retrospective Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Introduction It is a pleasure to witness the remarkable success and expansion of the Internet, which has led to economic growth, prosperity, and jobs for so many Americans. The Internet has further helped bring the entire human family closer together, by expanding communications worldwide. This Information Superhighway has helped businesses, schools, and communities find and share they information they critically need. It is especially exciting to me, as one of the principal creators of the Internet, to see the expanded role of the Information Superhighway in society today. In March 1999, I happened to mention in a widely-cited interview that [d]uring my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.[1] Many of my constituents, familiar with my work in social and environmental policy, were previously unaware of the nature of my technical contributions to the early Internet. A number of them contacted me to ask for the details of my involvement. I have therefore decided to produce the present memo as an outline of some of this history. It is my pleasure to present it in the hope that it will be of some use to amateur Internet historians and other interested citizens. This paper provides historical recollections of the development of the Information Superhighway and (on a personal note) how I took the initiative in creating it. Early History of the Internet The Internet first came into being during my term in the House, as a direct response to a bill co-sponsored by myself and a number of my colleagues with an interest in expanding the opportunities available to Americans with the creation of an Information Superhighway. With the assistance of a number of fine researchers in both the public and private sectors, I immediately set to work creating an architecture for the new network. I came to realize that the new Information Superhighway would require a large number of standard protocols to allow computers to communicate with one another easily. Therefore, with the advice of my colleagues in the House, I began by publishing the first draft of the Internet Protocol[2], the basic building block of the Internet. If you think of the Internet as a highway, my Internet Protocol is something like a chip of concrete or asphalt which is used to pave that highway. Since IP was useful only for getting low-level information from one place to another, which was not sufficient for all of the applications to which I anticipated my fellow Americans would desire to put this new technology, I also produced several companion protocols. Gore [Page 1] RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999 I initially developed the Transmission Control Protocol[3], User Datagram Protocol[4], and Internet Control Message Protocol[5] in order to bring flexible session-level communications to American society. These protocols serve as higher-level guidelines, like road markings or street signs on a highway, to provide a reliable and robust communications architecture for future generations. Further Development of the Internet Late in my term as Representative from Tennessee, I developed a number of high-level applications on top of the TCP. Recognizing the invaluable role e-mail could play in supporting education and commerce, I invented it and documented a protocol (the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol[6]) and an Internet standard format[7] for its transmission. Amidst a program of progressive social legislation, I ran a successful election campaign for the United States Senate, and was sworn in to this office in 1985. As a Senator, I continued my efforts to develop and improve the Information Superhighway, creating increasingly sophisticated programs and protocols for dealing with the challenges facing a networked society. It rapidly became necessary, as a part of the growing Internet, to allow for the transfer of data files from place to place. Almost immediately after the beginning of my first Senate term, my office began to receive a number of calls from concerned citizens from Tennessee and elsewhere, who argued that the future of America's youth might be severely handicapped unless the government acted quickly to guarantee a means of remote file copying. My colleagues and I responded to such concerns with the File Transfer Protocol[8]. During my Senate term, I was also instrumental in the development of the new Domain Name System ([9], [10], [11]). I also worked to ensure that the e-mail systems I had invented only a few years before would receive the necessary guidance to stay modern and competitive. My leadership resulted in a specification[12] which detailed the interaction between e-mail and the DNS, thus guaranteeing that U.S. industry would remain at the forefront of networking technology for years to come. I further improved e-mail facilities by creating the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions[13], which further expanded the power of electronic mail to carry more types of information of importance to my constituents. Challenging Times for the Information Superhighway Late in my second term in the United States Senate, the Internet faced a number of significant challenges associated with its continued growth. I worked to build partnerships between the public and private sectors to help resolve these problems and keep the Information Superhighway available and useful for all Americans. As IP address space began to appear scarce, I led an IETF Working Group charged with finding solutions to the problems associated with address scarcity. I have always been a dedicated conservationist, convinced that it is essential for Americans to protect their limited natural resources; I drew on my experiences within the environmental movement to illustrate the need to conserve IP address space. Though a few short-sighted elements within the business community initially resisted these conservations efforts, I was ultimately able to build a broad bi-partisan consensus and demonstrate to all concerned that Gore [Page 2] RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999 protecting our IP address space for the benefit of future generations is in the interest of all Americans. I produced several concrete proposals to improve address space conservation, not least of which was Classless Inter-Domain Routing[14], which allowed ordinary Americans to make more efficient use of their IP address allocations. It also allowed thousands of previously wasted IP addresses to be reclaimed and recycled. Toward the end of my second Senate term, I turned my legislative and technical efforts toward the developing market of dial-up Internet access, which was beginning to become a significant factor in the task of bringing access to the Information Superhighway to the public on a large scale. My initial efforts yielded the Serial Line Internet Protocol[15], to which I later added the Point-to-Point Protocol[16]. With the help of my friend and colleague Van Jacobsen, I created a collection of techniques for IP header compression[17] to alleviate the burden that full-scale uncompressed IP over a dialup link posed for the average American. Beginning during my second term as Senator, and continuing into my first term as Vice President, I also spearheaded the World Wide Web project, a new milestone in communications, which helped make the Information Superhighway more accessible to everyone. Thanks to the combination of the Hypertext Transport Protocol[18] and Hypertext Markup Language[19], the World Wide Web was able to transform the way people across the nation made use of the Internet. Finally, I worked to address the concern that, with the growth of the Web and of large-scale commercial dial-up use, Internet routing was becoming unworkably complex, and needed to be handled in a more elegant, sophisticated, logical, and efficient manner. Through a partnership between public and private sectors, I helped produce a pioneering early version of the Border Gateway Protocol, which set the stage for the current Border Gateway Protocol, Version 4[20], which I was eventually honored to co-author as Vice President. The Clipper and Capstone Initiatives Over time, many of the users of the Internet began to express concerns about their privacy and the confidentiality of their communications. In response to their concerns, the President and I developed a powerful and flexible architecture designed to, as the President put it, bring the Federal Government together with industry in a voluntary program to improve the security and privacy of ... communications while meeting the legitimate needs of law enforcement.[21] The President and I noted that we had carefully considered a number of important factors. -- the privacy of our citizens, including the need to employ voice or data encryption for business purposes; -- the ability of authorized officials to access telephone calls and data, under proper court or other legal order, when necessary to protect our citizens; -- the effective and timely use of the most modern technology to build the National Information Gore [Page 3] RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999 Infrastructure needed to promote economic growth and the competitiveness of American industry in the global marketplace; and -- the need of U.S. companies to manufacture and export high technology products.[21] We carefully considered the concerns raised by law enforcement and privacy advocacy groups, and discovered that the apparent conflicts between their opinions were illusory; in fact, both concerns can be, and in fact are, harmoniously balanced through a reasoned, balanced approach such as is proposed with the "Clipper Chip" and similar encryption techniques.[21] Our Administration additionally developed a sophisticated counterpart of Clipper for data communications, called Capstone. Capstone is capable of directly protecting the Information Superhighway and Americans' private communications. Despite occasional industry opposition, the Administration has remained committed to its fundamental principles of citizens' privacy and lawful law enforcement access, and believes, as an independent review found[22], that the encryption algorithms employed in Clipper and Capstone are secure and state-of-the-art. We are very proud of all that we have accomplished with Clipper and Capstone, which demonstrate the commitment of our Administration to improving Americans' privacy on the Information Superhighway. The Development of the World Wide Web and Parental Advisories As noted above, the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) brought untold opportunities for the use of the Information Superhighway in all areas of American society. Unfortunately, it also brought with it risks and challenges. Since my design for the WWW included simple facilities for the transmission of pictures and diagrams, the WWW could also be used to transmit undesirable and inappropriate materials. My wife Mary Elizabeth (Tipper) has had a lifelong concern for the health, safety, and well-being of our children, and has long been a tireless advocate for parental notification and control of explicit Internet datagrams, which represent one of the greatest threats to the well-being of our children. During my term as Vice President, Tipper and I learned that the widespread availability of explicit datagrams on the Internet was a subject of serious concern to parents and teachers all across our nation. Tipper devoted herself for several years to the remarkably challenging task of crafting solutions to these problems which would protect our children and at the same time respect Americans' rights to freedom of speech. I was extremely proud of Tipper's work and what resulted from it. She was instrumental in the development of the Platform for Internet Content Selection[23], a neutral, flexible, W3C-endorsed architecture for allowing parents to make responsible choices about the kinds of material their children could access over the Internet. Tipper further showed the strength of her character by defending her efforts in the face of numerous criticisms. When critics claimed that PICS facilitated automated censorship and would be used by oppressive regimes to infringe on the human rights of their subjects, my wife staunchly defended her efforts. I stood behind her and gave her my strongest possible support, and, in time, the charges that PICS facilitated censorship and violations of the Universal Declaration of Gore [Page 4] RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999 Human Rights were soundly rebuffed by the W3C: Some people argue that unrestricted access to information is a fundamental human rights question that transcends national sovereignty. W3C has not adopted that position. [...] W3C leaves this question to the political and legal processes of each country.[24] It is a remarkable credit to Tipper that she was willing to defend the principle that access to information is not a human rights question, but is more properly a narrow technical and parental control issue, at a time when this point of view was the subject of considerable controversy. I am extremely proud of her efforts on both advocacy and technical fronts, which have managed to secure a considerable voluntary consensus in the media industry in favor of parental advisory labels. At about the same time that Tipper was developing PICS, I consulted with those Senators and Representatives who seemed especially dedicated to the cause of protecting our children, and encouraged them to take further action toward these ends. The result was the bipartisan Communications Decency Act of 1996, which enjoyed wide support throughout the nation. Regrettably, the CDA was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1997[25]. This Court decision, however, has made Tipper's work all the more essential in assuring that parents retain control over the information their children obtain. Internet in the Balance In 1992, during my first Vice Presidential election campaign, I published my book _Internet in the Balance: Internetworking and the Human Spirit_[26]. I believe that this book provides an excellent overview of the history of the Internet and the roles played by myself and by my colleagues in its formation. _Internet in the Balance_ expressed my concerns as a lifelong Internet activist about the future of the Internet. I described the latest scientific findings concerning the health and sustainability of the Internet, as well as some of the threats industrial society, if left unchecked, could pose to the long-term sustainability of the Internet, and so to our childrens' future. _Internet in the Balance_ addresses the need for partnerships between the public and private sectors in maintaining the health and well-being of the Internet for ourselves and our children as we move into the twenty-first century. As Vice President, I have important duties as an elected representative of the people of the United States. As a technologist, I have obligations to the survival of the delicate technical systems that make up the Internet. I believe that these two interests are fundamentally harmonious, and I have endeavoured in my time as Vice President to balance these two interests, and especially to demonstrate the important connection between the well-being of the Internet and the well-being of the United States. As an expression of my continuing dedication to the important challenge of shaping the future of Internetworking, I took time during my term as Vice President to produce the definitive standard for a new "Next Generation" Internet Protocol, which will serve the needs of the next generation of Americans as they continue to rely on the Information Superhighway in all areas of their lives. My "Next Generation" Internet Protocol, defined in RFC 2460[27], includes 128-bit addressing, as well as other architectural improvements, and paves the way for an upgrade to a new, multi-lane Information Superhighway. Gore [Page 5] RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999 Conclusion As we look toward the dawn of the twenty-first century, Americans have much to be proud of in the Internet. We can continue to hope that the Information Superhighway will deliver valuable educational information to future generations of schoolchildren, stimulate commerce, and keep ordinary Americans in contact with their government. I am honored to have been a part of the development of the Information Superhighway. Acknowledgments The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of his wife, Tipper Gore, as well as that of William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States, in the preparation of this document and the completion of the work described herein. Portions of this work were funded by the DoD's Advanced Research Projects Agency and by the National Science Foundation, although I cannot recall which portions at this time. References [1] Gore, A., televised interview with Wolf Blitzer, Late Edition Primetime, Cable News Network, March 9, 1999. [2] Gore, A., "Internet Protocol", RFC 791, House of Representatives, September 1981. [3] Gore, A., "Transmission Control Protocol", RFC 793, House of Representatives, September 1981. [4] Gore, A., "User Datagram Protocol", RFC 768, House of Representatives, September 1980. [5] Gore, A., "Internet Control Message Protocol", RFC 792, House of Representatives, April 1990. [6] Gore, A., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 821, House of Representatives, August 1982. [7] Gore, A., "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages", RFC 822, House of Representatives, August 1982. [8] Gore, A., "File Transfer Protocol", RFC 959, United States Senate, October 1985. [9] Gore, A., "Domain Administrators Operations Guide", RFC 1033, United States Senate, November 1987. [10] Gore, A., "Domain Names: Concepts and Facilities", RFC 1034, United States Senate, November 1987. [11] Gore, A., "Domain Names: Implementation and Specification", RFC 1035, United States Senate, November 1987. [12] Gore, A., "Mail Routing and the Domain System", RFC 974, United States Senate, January 1986. [13] Gore, A., "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions: Part One, Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies", RFC 1521, United States Senate, September 1993. RFC 1521 has been complemented and augmented by a number of subsequent works by many of my friends and colleagues. [14] Gore, A., "An Architecture for IP Address Allocation with CIDR", RFC 1518, United States Senate, September 1993. [15] Gore, A., "A Nonstandard for Transmission of IP Datagrams over Serial Lines: SLIP", United States Senate, June 1988. I chose to call this protocol a "nonstandard" because of the realization that it was, at best, a stop-gap measure, and that the American people ultimately deserved a more complete, functional, and general serial-line encapsulation protocol. This I ultimately produced in PPP[16]. Gore [Page 6] RFC 3000 Internet History - A Retrospective April 1999 [16] Gore, A., "The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)", RFC 1661, United States Senate, July 1994. [17] Gore, A., and Jacobsen, V., "Compressing TCP/IP Headers for Low-Speed Serial Links", RFC 1144, United States Senate and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, February 1990. [18] Gore, A., Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and Frystyk, H., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0", RFC 1945, Office of the Vice President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of California at Irvine, May 1996. The Office of the Vice President has been working closely with the W3C to produce the current W3C HTTP/1.1 recommendation. [19] Gore, A., Berners-Lee, T., and Connolly, D., "Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0", RFC 1866, Office of the Vice President and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 1995. The Office of the Vice President has been working closely with the W3C to produce the current W3C HTML 4.0 recommendation. [20] Gore, A., Rechter, Y., and Li, T., "A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 1771, Office of the Vice President, IBM Corp., and Cisco Systems, March 1995. [21] The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Statement, April 16, 1993. [22] Brickell, E. F., Denning, D. E., Kent, S. T., Maher, D. P., and Tuchman, W., "SKIPJACK Review: Interim Report", July 28, 1993. [23] Gore, M. E., "Platform for Internet Content Selection, Version 1.1": "Rating Services and Rating Systems (and their Machine Readable Descriptions)", "PICS Label Distribution Label Syntax and Communication Protocols", "PICSRules 1.1", and "PICS Signed Labels (DSig) 1.0 Specification", W3C Recommendations, October 1996. [24] Resnick, P., "PICS, Censorship, and Intellectual Freedom Frequently Asked Questions", January 26, 1998. [25] United States Supreme Court, _Reno, Attorney General of the United States, et al., v. American Civil Liberties Union, et al._ 521 U.S. ___ (1997), case no. 96-511. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. [26] Gore, A., _Internet in the Balance: Internetworking and the Human Spirit_, Houghton Mifflin 1992. [27] Gore, A., "Internet Protocol, Version 6: Specification", RFC 2460, Office of the Vice President, December 1998. Security Considerations Security considerations are not addressed in this memo. Author's Address Albert Gore The White House Office of the Vice President 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, DC 20500 Phone: (202)456-1414 E-mail: vice.president@WHITEHOUSE.GOV Gore [Page 7] -- Seth David Schoen / schoen@uclink4.berkeley.edu He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do." And they said, "Nay, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations." (1 Sam 8) http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/ http://www.loyalty.org/ ===================================================================== To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@zork.net saying "unsubscribe crackmonkey" in the body of the message.