Our Internet engineering responsibility: my mailings and you

Email Transcript

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SHORT DESCRIPTION

This document is the transcript of our email titled, "Our Internet engineering responsibility: my mailings and you." We typically send this as an introductory email to a new recipient we are adding to our email distribution list.

Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Mohsen Banan, and I am an Internet engineer and a technological activist.

Along with many others, I am gravely concerned about the current status and future direction of the Internet. The Internet has become a critical global public resource, with far-reaching consequences for the welfare of society. Yet today the Internet Services industry is a proprietary construct, almost entirely owned and controlled by proprietary commercial interests. This represents a significant hazard to the broader interests of society. As well as inhibiting engineering creativity and business competition, proprietary ownership of the Internet severely endangers critical civil liberties such as personal privacy, freedom of information, and freedom of speech.

I oppose patent and copyright law as practiced today in the West, and I am a strong proponent of the free software ideology within the Internet context. I am also the originator of a number of Internet engineering and business initiatives. These include the Libre Services initiative, and its essential complement: a new business model for Internet Application Services.

As a first-generation Internet engineer, I believe my profession has a unique responsibility to maintain the integrity of the Internet on behalf of the public. We stand at a technological inflection point, and what we do today, or do not do, will have a profound effect on the direction and evolution of the Internet for generations to come.

The purpose of this email is to let you know that I have added your name to my address book, and tagged your name as someone who may be interested in reading selected items of my writing.

As part of the fulfillment of my professional responsibility, I will occasionally be sending you articles, announcements and other information. The sort of information I send typically relates to free protocols, open-source and free software, and their role in our society. I also sometimes send out announcements about our own non-proprietary work and progress at the Free Protocols Foundation and Neda Communications.

The frequency of my mailings varies considerably, depending on whether I have anything worthwhile to say. During my most active periods the frequency might reach one mailing every 10 days; it usually is much less than this. Initially you may receive several emails all at once, but please don’t be alarmed, this is just a one time burst to bring you up to date on our recent work. After that you will hear from me, probably, less often than you check your tire pressures.

The information I send is chosen because I believe it to be relevant and of interest to the people I send it to. But if you would rather not receive this kind of mail please let me know. Just give me a call, or drop me a line at libre@mohsen.banan.1.byname.net

Regards,