ITE221 – Fall 2011 – Chapter 13

Site reviewed: http://www.isoc.org/

For Chapter 13, I visited the Internet Society’s website. ISOC, according to their “About ISOC” page, is a non-profit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education and policy, dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world. They are also the home for the groups responsible for the Internet’s infrastructure standards, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). According to their Membership section, anyone can join at either a free or sustaining (paid-membership) level, and participate in conferences, lectures, and local group chapters. At http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml, they have a “Brief History of the Internet", written by some of the individuals responsible for the Internet as we know it today; at http://www.isoc.org/tools/blogs/scenarios/, ISOC lays out several scenarios detailing how the Internet might evolve over the next 10 years or so; and at http://www.isoc.org/internet/issues/, they address a number of issues with the Internet as it is and as it is developing, such as access to the Internet, innovation, intellectual property, IPv6, Net neutrality, security, and spam, among others – each of these has its own page, going into a fair amount of detail on the subject. All in all, for anyone researching the early days of the Internet, technical details about how it works, the possible directions it might be going – really, just about anything having to do with the Internet! – this would be the best place I could think of to start. There’s a lot of fascinating reading here – I’ll be coming back here once I have a little more time to spend on exploring, I think.