On 01/23/2014 09:17 AM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
I am particularly concerned with the narrow definition of "community", "Internet community", "end user community" - or in fact as their lack of definition.
Let me respond to that particular point rather than the previous focus of this thread. There may well be not one community but rather multiple communities. And people may move between these communities from instant-to-instant depending on what they are doing at that instant. I have observed that over the last few years that there has been a significant shift in the way that users perceive this thing we all call "the internet" (with or without a capital 'I'). For many of us who have been around for a while we see the internet as a system that moves IP packets from computer interface with an IP address to another computer interface with an IP address. We are the packet-heads. But for many people who arrived more recently the perception of the net is of a bag of applications. We packet heads tend to be very concerned about end-to-end principles and neutrality of packet flows. The latter community may focus more on matters of openness, fairness, portability, and reliability of those applications without much regard to the underlying plumbing. (And one might consider that the interests of those who use applications are somewhat different than those who create and deploy applications.) I would note that to the latter community, IP addresses and domain names may be submerging to become hidden machinery and are being replaced by URL/URI based names or application specific names [such as Facebook logins.] I believe that this shift in naming/addressing will eventually significantly alter our internet governance needs. The interests of these groups are one of those Venn diagrams with overlapping circles - there is an area of mutual concern but also large areas where each group has its own concern. I am far from suggesting that these groups form different "stakeholders" - that is because I abhor the concept of top-down pre-defined groups of interest called "stakeholders". However, I do feel that we could gain a bit of clarity if we were begin to recognize that the word "internet" has different meanings to different people and that to best understand opinions we need to comprehend the context from which those opinions arose. My sense is that we will find that as a result opinions that seem in opposition, if the context is understood, might actually be opinions that are in alignment, or at least not in conflict. --karl--