DARPA Director On How to Turn Inspiration Into Innovation (video)

How to Turn Inspiration Into Innovation - DARPA [darpa.mil] Director Arati Prabhakar discusses how large organizations are sometimes uniquely fitted to research and test new ideas, in a conversation with WSJ financial editor Dennis Berman at CEO Council. Published on Nov 18, 2015

DARPA: "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. DARPA was created in 1958 as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Its purpose was to formulate and execute research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science, with the aim to reach beyond immediate military requirements. The administration was responding to the Soviet launching of Sputnik 1 in 1957, and DARPA's mission was to ensure U.S. military technology would be more sophisticated than that of the nation's potential enemies." (source:  Wikipedia)

DARPA and the Internet:
"In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and the system of networks which emerged from the research was known as the "Internet." The system of protocols which was developed over the course of this research effort became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, after the two initial protocols developed: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the development of the NSFNET which, today, provides a major backbone communication service for the Internet .... A great deal of support for the Internet community has come from the U.S. Federal Government, since the Internet was originally part of a federally-funded research program and, subsequently, has become a major part of the U.S. research infrastructure. During the late 1980's, however, the population of Internet users and network constituents expanded internationally and began to include commercial facilities. Indeed, the bulk of the system today is made up of private networking facilities in educational and research institutions, businesses and in government organizations across the globe ... Over its fifteen year history, the Internet has functioned as a collaboration among cooperating parties. Certain key functions have been critical for its operation, not the least of which is the specification of the protocols by which the components of the system operate. These were originally developed in the DARPA research program mentioned above, but in the last five or six years, this work has been undertaken on a wider basis with support from Government agencies in many countries, industry and the academic community. The Internet Activities Board (IAB) was created in 1983 to guide the evolution of the TCP/IP Protocol Suite and to provide research advice to the Internet community.... Throughout the development of the Internet, its protocols and other aspects of its operation have been documented first in a series of documents called Internet Experiment Notes and, later, in a series of documents called Requests for Comment (RFCs). The latter were used initially to document the protocols of the first packet switching network developed by DARPA, the ARPANET, beginning in 1969, and have become the principal archive of information about the Internet. At present, the publication function is provided by an RFC editor." Source: A Brief History of the Internet & Related Networks | Internet Society (emphasis and link added).

See also: Did We Build the 'Right' Internet? (An Interview with Prof Andrew Russell): "... If there are true villains, they are the national security state and the self-interested capitalists. They only want to increase their status and power, and often misrepresent the importance of their role and value in the development of the Internet. But I think if we looked closely even at these 'villains', we would see simple humans, with human flaws, each pursuing a certain set of interests for reasons that made sense to them, no better or worse than the rest of us...."

Tweets by @DARPA


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DISCLAIMER

Happy Birthday, Internet!

Above: ARPANET logical map, March 1977 (by ARPANET [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

ARPANET went LIVE between UCLA and Stanford Research Institute on this day in 1969:

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet switching network and the first network to implement the protocol suite TCP/IP. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. ARPANET was initially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. Packet switching was based on concepts and designs by Americans Leonard Kleinrock and Paul Baran, British scientist Donald Davies and Lawrence Roberts of the Lincoln Laboratory. The TCP/IP communications protocols were developed for ARPANET by computer scientists Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, and incorporated concepts by Louis Pouzin for the French CYCLADES project. (Wikipedia)

ARPANET facts:

• Location: United States
• Protocols: NCP, TCP/IP
• Established 1969; 46 years ago
• Current status: Evolved into NSFNET
• Commercial? No
• Funding: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (U.S. government)

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DISCLAIMER

What Is The US Government's Claim to the Internet Root?

This is part 2 of the post: The Day Jon Postel Freed The Internet Root From US Government Control

So what exactly is the U.S. Government's claim of authority to, or over, the Internet or its highest domain in the hierarchy of the DNS, the Internet Root Zone?

Current List of the 13 Named  Root Zone Authorities - source: IANA

Slide from Root Server Operators Presentation to GAC in 2003

Today the authoritative name servers that serve the Internet DNS root zone, commonly known as the “root servers,” are in fact a network of hundreds of servers in many countries around the world. They are configured in the DNS root zone as 13 named authorities, as shown above but no single organization (neither commercial nor governmental) controls the entire system. The root zone is the information created by IANA and distributed by Verisign to all root servers. The 13 named authorities in the DNS root zone are operated by 12 independent organizations - 10 located in the United States, and 1 each in Sweden, the Netherlands and Japan. Hundreds of machines respond to DNS queries sent to the root server IP addresses through a technique known as "any cast." This technique ensures global accessibility of root zone data. Changes to the root zone are currently administered by ICANN through the IANA function pursuant to the contract administrated by NTIA. VeriSign performs the related root zone management functions pursuant to a cooperative agreement with NTIA which ensures that the procedure of making changes to the root zone is properly followed and observed.

"Governance of the root zone has been one of the most controversial issues in the international Internet policy debate. The main point raising divergent views has been about the historical role of the United States in the stewardship of changes to the root zone as administered through the IANA process by ICANN." Mapping of international Internet public policy issues, pp.16-17, April, 2015 (emphasis added).

Therefore, it was no surprise that in the course of the IANA stewardship transition, specifically, within the CCWG on ICANN accountability, a question was raised as to the US government's "claim" to the Internet root. The very same US government official quoted in part one in the Washington Post excerpt about the Postel root server incident in 1998, J. Beckwith Burr a/k/a Becky Burr (now Chief Privacy Officer and Deputy General Counsel of NeuStar, Inc.), is a member of the CCWG-Accountability group and wrote a lengthy, detailed response to that question which one can read in full here. Domain Mondo has edited and abbreviated it below (emphasis and links added):

"The answer to your question re USG [US government] “claim” to the root is – as I’m sure you know – somewhat convoluted ... The USG entered into a “cooperative agreement" with Network Solutions in 1993, under which Network Solutions operated the authoritative root, and also provided both registry and registrar services to TLDs other than ccTLDs. Until he died in 1998, Jon Postel was in charge of IANA functions through a contract between the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and DARPA. As far as I know, during that period, Jon delegated ccTLDs and Network Solutions added them to the root at Jon’s direction. We have no record of the terms and conditions under which these delegations occurred prior to 1994, when RFC 1591 was issued. "The Cooperative Agreement was somewhat ambiguous about “ownership” and “authority.” In 1993, when the Cooperative Agreement was signed, there were some 7500 registered domain names.... The situation was complicated by the fact that the IANA functions – so presumably the authority to modify the authoritative root – was performed by USC/ISI under a regular government procurement contract with DARPA. Did that mean DARPA had authority to control changes to the authoritative root? I don’t think anyone really knows. Maybe the answer lies in the Postel archives, which have not been made available by USC. And finally, it should be noted that throughout this period there were no formal agreements with the root server operators in the US and elsewhere ... As a practical matter, it is the root server operators who determine which root is authoritative (as Jon once demonstrated). So, call the situation murky....

"Your question about whether or not the USG has a basis for its “claim” of authority over the root is a bit metaphysical. The USG clearly has the right to prevent Verisign from modifying the authoritative root. Whether or not it had the right before Amendment 11, Verisign gave the DOC [Department of Commerce] that right by contract in that amendment. The USG’s authority to determine which root serves as the authoritative root and who operates that root is not spelled out in black and white anywhere that I know of – it is something that happened along the way, a byproduct of contract and the passage of time, and certainly not an inherently governmental function. To the extent there ever was “property” - e.g., in the form of USG funded root server hardware, for example, I am confident that such property is long past its useful life and no longer in service. What we know for sure is that Verisign operates the authoritative root and the DOC has the contractual authority to tell Verisign not to make a change to the root. That right reflects a contractual agreement between two parties, and does not seem to me to be a delegation of authority over USG “property.” Accordingly, I think the USG has the right to transfer authority for changes to the root in the manner contemplated here. To be sure, this transfer was in fact contemplated expressly in Amendment 11, when the DOC and Verisign agreed that the USG had the right to direct Verisign to follow the directions of “Newco” (which subsequently became ICANN)...."

further info:
root-servers.org
ICANN | NSI-NSF Cooperative Agreement | 1 January 1993
Verisign Cooperative Agreement | NTIA
IANA Functions and Related Root Zone Management Transition Questions and Answers | NTIA

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