[discuss] shifts in IANA/accountability discussion: your thoughts?

[Barry Shein]

All very interesting, yes I read every word.

I think sometimes we fuss too much about the past, about mostly
settled issues, and not enough about a vision for the future.

Even some of these visions for the future are just reorganized visions
of the past.

The Internet of Things is a vision for the future, but I'm not sure
it's all that interesting. Maybe it's X10 (the home network system)
with superior firepower. It will happen, we will open web browsers on
our air conditioners and door locks and garage openers. They probably
don't really have a lot to say to us.

This was also a vision for RFID in the late 1990s, no? What happened
to unmanned shops where you picked up items you wanted and as you
walked out the door your phone (or whatever) paid for them? Mostly
Wal-Mart used them to try to reduce theft of razor blades (no joke,
most stolen item particularly by employees in Wal-Marts, or so they
said, they were a major investor in early RFID.)

The problem is there is a tendency to return to old economic and
business models and economic and business models tend to define what
is possible.

Perhaps in a world of abstract virtual currency new ways of creating
wealth will be discovered and accepted. Models which are truly
post-natural resource, post-rentier, post-manufacture and distribution
of tangible goods.

The financial sectors already do this, trillions are created and
destroyed daily in completely abstract wealth which only exists,
sometimes for nanoseconds, within bit streams. The near-instaneous
arbitrage of risk, for example.

This is where true revolutions come from, new methods of wealth
creation and distribution, not fighting over old models. Leave that to
the lawyers.


-- 
        -Barry Shein

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