Dear FIWARE, I would like to discuss about possible interesting synergies between the project we are currently undertaking and FIWARE. We think we have a very interesting, complementary approach and an actual delivery channel that could help deliver the FIWARE developed and supported technologies end up at end users. I'm director of Strategy at NLnet foundation, which originally introduced the internet (TCP/IP) in Europe in the eighties. So we do have some credits in this area. We are currently working on something called the Network Effect Alliance, to bundle internet innovations towards internet wide deployment. Some more detail is available at: http://networkeffectalliance.org We think the mere availability of a platform of its kind offers exciting new opportunities for rollout of future internet technologies. We want to take responsibility to build a more sustainable internet ecosystem, because we think the current system is fragmented. We hope you would be interested in collaboration. Please contact me at your earliest convenience. Kind regards, Michiel Leenaars - -- Michiel Leenaars Director of Strategy NLnet Foundation Address: NLnet Foundation Science Park 400 (Matrix 2) 1098 XH Amsterdam The Netherlands http://nlnet.nl sip/xmpp: michiel [@t] nlnet.nl fixed: +31 20 8005134 mobile: +31 6 27050947 - --------------- Situation: ---------- Despite all the hard work in the technical community no internet standards besides email and http have seen internet wide deployment. Our hypothesis is that even email reinvented today (e.g. a proven technology with a business model we know works) would not make a dent in the market. So while there are mature as well as very promising upcoming standards from the technical community around communication, security, privacy and accessibility (to name a few: XMPP, SIP, Realtime Text, DKIM, SPF and DANE) as well as technological upgrades like IPv6 and DNSSEC - all of them struggle to get to the end user. Of course there are standalone providers for each individual, but normal, non-technical people cannot get any of these services from their current isp. The same goes for very strategic identity services such as OAuth, OpenID, WebID - nothing has come even close to internet wide adoption. The bottleneck: --------------- We believe there is a clear problem at the ecosystem level. An key role is played by the business reality of the hosting world, which is responsible for the vast majority of all websites and mail servers on the planet (e.g. the 'long tail'). This sector uses an outdated software stack - partly legacy homebrew installs, and partly outsourced legacy technology (commercial web hosting panel solutions like cpanel and Plesk). All of them seem to be caught in a price race to the bottom and have been frozen in features since they were originally put in place in the nineties - with the last thing to make it (and there is some irony as the technology was obsolete at the time already) Frontpage Extensions (tm). Our plan: --------- We plan to change the ecosystem from the inside rather than the outside and break the 'we compete on cost, so we can't give you more services' mantra, while leaving the heterogeneity of the industry intact. This by providing a zero cost, high quality software stack for hosting companies, which replaces their non-supported and aged existing stack with a well-supported, professional modern open source stack - which makes all the 'difficult stuff' just work. And incidentally having this will give us a platform to deliver support for an unlimited amount of open standards and domain name driven services in the future, optimise the ecological footprint of the tech industry and strenghten choice and robustness against censorship - blocking Facebook or Youtube is easier than blocking the entire net site by site - in short, adding high value for society, end users as well as hosting companies. Effort: ------- Although most if not all of the software to do so exists already, it is still a sizable effort to bundle it and make it into a well-integrated whole for the mass market. It needs to happen, though - there seems to be no viable other way to move the internet forward out of this state of permafrost. The need for an Alliance: ------------------------- Hosting companies won't 'bet the house' on any solution (no matter how good) if there is not a broad community behind it. That is why it is important there is an alliance behind it with major players involved. There are a lot of stakeholders in the internet model for which the current status quo of closed services and simultaneously not being able to get any innovation through to the wider internet is a real problem. We have been brainstorming with a significant amount of future alliance members - registries such as Verisign, PIR, Afilias and Neustar as well as a number of CCTLD's but also with W3C, NREN's, RIR's, civil society organisations like Internet Society, ISPs and others. End user centric services: -------------------------- The disruptive force lies in the fact that decentralised services by their nature are end user centric. We believe that generically for the internet user as well as for the industry having identity services under the users/employers/etc domain of choice (and of course the choice to have multiple disconnnected identities in parallel, under different domains through different providers if so desired) are essential for a healthy future for the internet and thus for society. After all, we have over 200 million domain names, some of which have half a million or more actual users underneath (e.g. user at sth.gov is meaningful in a way no Twitter account can ever be). With a total of over 2 billion users with private, professional and role-based identities, repartitioning the same group of people every service again and again with different identifiers in a flat namespace (e.g. in Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc) breaks interoperability and makes no sense. Past experiments (ICQ, MSN, AOL messenger, etc) have proven that. Portable, user owned domain name driven identities empower the user to do anything - and that is what the internet community has tried to enable in the last decades. Time has proven that separately none of these technological upgrades has stood any chance - not a single technology made it past the threshold to internet wide deployment in the last 15 years. But with a bundled approach and the weight of hundreds of millions of hosted domains and a professional industry backing it up we think there is a pretty good chance to get the network effect to kick in and help maintain the openness and creative nature of the internet - hence of course the name. ----------------
You can get more information about our cookies and privacy policies clicking on the following links: Privacy policy Cookies policy