On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 10:04 AM Toerless Eckert <tte@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 06, 2020 at 08:40:22AM -0500, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> Skype, Zoom, WebEx, Keybase, Signal etc. are all fine for collaboration
> inside enterprises. But none of them is a replacement for email or the
> telephone because none of them can talk to each other. We need a federated,
> open solution. And the IETF is the place people are going to be looking to
> develop that.
When governments prefer to communicate via facebook and twitter,
its a little bit too late trying to tell the planet that global
communications should not be based on vertical monopolies of global companies.
Governments have always preferred the use of broadcast communications. The BBC, ABC, CBS. Vertical monopolies have always served them well.
Business has never had a problem with monopolies that provided universal connectivity either. The Royal Mail, the US Postal Service, AT&T.
The problem comes when there is no universal connectivity. I can deploy Microsoft Exchange inside my business and use the proprietary exchange protocols to communicate with it from Outlook (assuming those are still in place). But to send emails to the auditors, the external counsel, to customers and suppliers, SMTP is the only game in town. Skype is only viable because it gates to PSTN.
Back when we were putting the Web into the Clinton Whitehouse, there were two problems they were concerned about. Putting up the Web server on whitehouse.gov was the easy part. That is just a different mode for broadcast media. The publications server which sent out the press releases was another easy win.
The much harder problem, one that we never really solved was mass listening. The POTUS gets (or got) two 20 truckloads of mail a day and every single one of those was read by a team of volunteers. And the President received a daily report summarizing what people are writing to him about with excerpts from specific letters, the ones Clinton was most interested in being the 'kitchen table' letters from 'ordinary Americans'.
Facebook and Twitter are lousy modes of communication for public discourse. We can and will do better. AOL looked so unstoppable at one point, TimeWarner gave away half their shareholder's capital to buy it..
I believe that if we provide a communication infrastructure that supports the major modes of communication: short messaging, mail, file sharing, voice, video based on open standards and open service provision and we provide state of the art cryptographic security to protect it and state of the art usability, we can succeed.
I know why the Web succeeded, I worked less than 50 feet from Tim's office while he was building it.. He told me how and why he took the moves he did. I have been closely involved in the development of three systems that have become infrastructure standards: The Web, the WebPKI and SAML.
Now that doesn't mean I am guaranteed to be the one that succeeds in this space. But I am pretty certain that in the next five years someone will whether they take my stuff and add some final touches that I hadn't understood the need for or ignore my stuff entirely and do it their way.
So take your pick, you can read my drafts now and start thinking about how to build a better system or you can wait two or three years till my company has established a user base and the technology is proven and buy me out. Or you can buy out the other guy or gal who came up with the better idea.
