Subject: Re: Internet 2020 Goals

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2014 10:04:06 -0700

On 5/29/2014 5:51 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 12:15 PM, Joe Touch <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> I'm talking about whether the IETF/ISOC is a useful home for the discussion.
>> I don't think it is, because for every 100 network researchers there are 101
>> such documents "predicting the future", none of which have done much without
>> associated money.
>
> Well you completely missed the difference between a goal and a prediction:
>
> A goal is an outcome that is desired.
> A prediction is an outcome that is expected.

I think you have it reversed:
	- a goal is an outcome towards which a community is working
	(with funding to back it up)

	- prediction is what groundhogs do early February, and people
	do with about as much accuracy and utility

> As I pointed out at the start, the money concern here is what to spend it on.

The people with the money get to decide that.

Joe

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2014 13:51:37 -0400

> The people with the money get to decide that.

Joe, I know you think you have a point here but you don't.

Back when I did high energy physics we did experiments costing over $1
billion for no particular reason than to satisfy our curiosity.

The Web has added over a trillion dollars a year to global GDP. There
is no shortage of governments willing to back efforts to build the
next generation Web. There is no shortage of companies either.

That does not mean that every government is always willing to fund
every type of project. Coming from the UK I know all about governments
who don't have a clue when it comes to funding research.

But I also know about it from the other side and the problem that the
type of research the academics want to do is not the type of research
the funders are interested in. The type of projects that gets
publications and tenure in academia are low risk incremental studies
of irrelevancies.

I am currently working on usable secure email, S/MIME and PGP done
right. Now that would not get tenure in any university and it
certainly would not get a published paper in a journal. But it is what
we need right now in the Internet community.

Fortunately for me, I can do that work because I have commercial
backing for my research (Comodo) and independent private means. But
most people who might want to do that type of work are not so
fortunate. Even in the IETF most people are working on near run
products not thinking about the future.

The whole point of proposing an Internet 2020 type program is
precisely to tell the politicians who make the real decisions on
funding that there are people they can talk to with a vision aligned
with theirs.

Funding is really not the problem here. The politicians would be only
too happy to write us physicist sized cheques for a next generation
Internet research project if they think there is a reasonable chance
it will deliver something they value.

The physicists got the cash for the LHC because they put up a very
simple proposition that the politicians could understand: Find the
Higgs Boson. That sales pitch got them the $10 billion they needed.

If you think money is the problem then you are not talking to the
right people, you don't understand the concerns of the people with the
money. Get the vision thing right and the money will flow.