Erik Huizer: My role in the Internet has been… I’ve been active in so-called Internet institutions that take care of the running of the Internet since 1987, ’88, something like that. I was one of the first non-American people to join the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the standardization organization for the Internet. And I’ve worked hard to establish that that became more international, for example by organizing the first meeting of the IETF outside of North America, in Amsterdam in ’93. And I was also one of the first Europeans on the steering group that steers the IETF, the Internet Engineering Steering Group, responsible for standardizing applications at that time. And at that time I worked at standardizing MIME, which makes sure that you can send attachments in emails, which nowadays seems kind of obvious that you can do that but it wasn’t at the time. So we standardized— It was one of the most important ones I did. And the World Wide Web as we know it now, that was standardized when I was responsible Area Director for applications, together with John Klensin my co-Area Director.
After that I was asked, I think it was ’95, to become a member of the Internet Architecture Board, the small group of people that that try to think ahead on the development of the Internet and work out the direction that the technology development should go. Did that for five years. After that I chaired the Internet Research Task Force for two years, where we try to coordinate research efforts to fulfill the needs of the Internet Architecture Board to make sure that we sustain their vision of the future with the research that is needed to get there.
And so the after I served five years on the board of trustees of the Internet Society. In a very difficult period because that was early 2000 to 2005, and that was the first crisis— the dot-com crisis. So the Internet Society ran out of money and almost went broke, and we decided on a plan to go and bid for the management of the .org domain. So all the domain names ending in .org, which are not-for-profit domains, so that would fit really well with the mission of the Internet Society.
We won that bid and established a company to run that, a nonprofit company called the Public Interest Registry. And I’m currently on the board of that company, making sure that their business is run well and that whatever money they make goes to the Internet Society so that the Internet Society can do Internet projects in developing countries, etc. with it.
Intertitle: Describe one of the breakthrough moments of the Internet in which you have been a key participant?
Huizer: If I think of breakthrough moments…there’s a couple. Let me highlight two. One will show you that I’m not somebody who’s who is capable of looking into the future. But in around ’92 I was Area Director for Applications in the IETF, responsible for standardizing applications. You have to remember that at that point in time the Internet was fully ASCII. So there was only letters as an interface. No graphics, only letters. And I was chairing a working group at that time that was looking at creating a common interface for databases. Because at that point in time, the first databases became connected to the Internet, and one was using an interface and another one was using another interface, and they were all different and that was…unusable for users, because you had to learn all those interfaces.
So we wanted to standardize them. And we were working on a protocol which we called Gopher, which seemed to be doing a really nice [job] and which could also incorporate graphics interfaces in the future. And we had a meeting in Zurich in ’92. And I was chairing the meeting and there was this guy coming up from CERN called Tim Berners-Lee. And he said “Well I have an alternative for Gopher and it’s called the World Wide Web.”
And he showed it to us. We gave him the space to show it to us. And you have to remember, he showed us an ASCII interface to the World Wide Web. It’s not the slick…you know, Internet Explorer, Safari interface that we are used to nowadays. And we looked at it and we said “Well…that’s okay” you know. It’s not like we went all out like “This is going to change the world.”
Unfortunately. Because then I’d put my money in other places if I’d known beforehand. But we recognized several useful aspects of it. So I worked with Tim and John Klensin together, and we standardized HTTP, we standardized HTML. But we had a lot of discussions about the URL, you know, the “http://” that you see in your browser address bar. And whether the “http” should be there or not. And I remember in the discussions we had somebody said “Well, imagine that it’s going to be put on the side of a bus in an advertisement.” And we were all laughing our heads off because the idea of a URL on the side of a bus seemed totally ridiculous to us. Four years later, the first URL was appearing on a bus. So that was one of those moments.
Another one which is less obvious but was I think incredibly significant is that the IETF had grown organically. Some guys got together, started standardizing some things. That grew, and grew. And some working groups were formed. Procedures were formed along the way. But these procedures were never documented. So for outsiders, it was an unclear procedure. It was not transparent. It was open, if you wanted to participate, but it was not clear how you had to participate, and therefore it was not really open and stuff like that. There was no appeals process if you disagreed with the decisions taken.
And so we needed to document that process and write it down and make it more transparent, more open, and more accountable. And together with Dave Crocker I edited the first RFC that documented the whole process and made it more transparent. And this RFC has now been superseded by new versions, etc. so my name’s dropped off it. But I’d like to think that that’s a significant contribution that I’ve made to this whole thing.
Intertitle: Describe the state of the Internet today with a weather analogy and explain why.
Huizer: The Internet today, if I look at it I would say there’s a…it’s partly cloudy, partly sunny. And we’re working hard to figure out how to move the clouds away.
Intertitle: What are your greatest hopes and fears for the future of the Internet?
Huizer: I’ve got a lot of concerns. But let me start out by saying that it’s good to have concerns about the Internet. We continuously need to work to make sure that the Internet stays open, trustworthy, and accessible. Those three are of prime importance. And we need to work on that.
But let me start by saying that whatever problems are in the way of the Internet, so far the Internet is like water. If you throw rocks in them, like problems, it flows around it. So, the problems we need to work on. That doesn’t make me a pessimist. I really think we can work that out.
But there’s a whole bunch of problems. Rather than mentioning them all, let me take an angle that not a lot of people probably take, is that the Internet nowadays is totally filled with metaphors. If you look at your desktop on your tablet or on your Mac or your PC, your whole desktop is a metaphor. The desktop itself is a metaphor, right? The Home button is a metaphor. Everything is hidden behind metaphors. If you think about it even the term “software” is a metaphor. Cyberspace is a metaphor, you know. We try to hide the complexity of the technology and the operations that are behind the smooth running of the Internet behind metaphors. The metaphors make it easy to use the Internet. I’ve got three daughters, they use the Internet purely based on those metaphors.
But. That has two significant dangers to it. First of all, because the technology is invading so much into our private lives and our working lives, technology decisions are no longer purely technology decisions that are made. Those technology decisions influence cultural decisions, for example. You can do an application this way or that way. Somebody chooses this way, and it might have cultural implications.
The obvious example of that is the Apple App Store. In the Apple App Store, nudity is not allowed. Which is okay by American cultural standards but which is by no means okay by European cultural standards, for example. So here there is an implicit decision behind the metaphor of a store that defines the culture of everybody who uses that kind of technology. So this is one of the dangers that you have. By using all those metaphors it’s not clear that there’s a lot of decisions behind it that really impact culture.
The second thing that is a danger is that a lot of people are no longer aware of the complexity and the technology behind it. They are not even interested in it. And I see exactly with the younger generation, both in the US as well as in Europe, that the interest in learning Internet technology or ICT technologies to maintain the Internet is decreasing. And that’s a real danger because then we get dependent on the technology experts that remain, who are either deployed by some commercial companies that make decisions that you are not aware of that they are making, or as Snowden has shown us it can come into the hands of a country, like for example that most of those people would live in a country that isn’t so democratic and that things are being built into software and hardware that you don’t want to be built in there and invade your privacy or something like that.
So we’re giving away part of our freedom by not being interested in the technology. And that is made very easy by the fact that we hide it all behind these smooth and slick metaphors.
Intertitle: What action should be taken to ensure the best possible future?
Huizer: Well there’s a couple of action that we need to take. First of all, we need to make working with governments who are— We need to make them aware of this problem. And we need to go out and educate people about the importance of…that we have students who are willing to learn about the Internet and its operation, and that it’s important to build that knowledge and to keep it in your country and not to only have it in commercial companies or in other countries but that you have it in universities, independent institutes, etc.
And the second thing I think is important is we need to look at Internet governance. Internet governance is a very complex problem. It already starts out with the definition, but the definition that I’m using is Internet governance is good stewardship of those things that need to be centrally coordinated on the Internet. Doing that in a way that you keep the interests of all stakeholders in mind rather than just one stakeholder.
And that is a very difficult issue. Because the Internet is global, it’s not national, it’s not even multinational, it’s global. It doesn’t belong to nations. It belongs to everybody, or it belongs to nobody, depending on the way you look at it.
So defining the governance of the Internet is a very difficult issue. We’ve worked on that for the IETF, for ICANN, for the IGF, and we’re getting to a sort of multistakeholder-kind model that seems to be working. But for a lot of governments that’s very difficult to acknowledge, that they are not in the lead but they are only one of the stakeholders in that process. And most of the democratic governments now seem to be able to go along with that, although the Republicans currently in the US are still opposing it. But certainly in less-democratic countries, what you see is that there’s a certain fear of the Internet, due to the Arab Spring developments, etc. and they want more influence and find it very difficult to support a multistakeholder model.