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When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish. The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

it’s impossible to overstate the importance of peer production to the modern digital world.

What sounds on the face of it like the most utopian of collectivist fantasies — millions of people sharing their ideas with no ownership claims — turns out to have made possible the communications infrastructure of our age.

Peer networks laid the foundation for the scientific revolution during the Enlightenment, via the formal and informal societies and coffeehouse gatherings where new research was shared. The digital revolution has made it clear that peer networks can work wonders in the modern age.

We thought maybe we’d put together a few temporary, informal memos on network protocols, the rules by which computers exchange information

Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or asserting authority.

Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.”

the federal government is not attached to Moore's Law

Here's an area for both some disruption and some lobbying. Let's build tools that allow members of Congress to aggregate messages being sent to them, and to associate those messages with congressional districts. Let's come up with a way for a member to see what their constituency is saying about any particular issue they'd like, and let's provide that as an open service so that anybody can see what a particular constituency is saying. That way, when a member has a track record of voting against the desires of a substantial portion of his or her district, we've got a record of it, and it can get brought up in the next election.

Right now, your voice online -- in the mediums you participate in, not only don't matter: legally they can't matter. Online identities don't count when it comes to the official record

Today we have a modern equivalent of the printing press in the Internet and all that it means. The Internet allows everyone to be a publisher, to have their voice heard,

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New Media is facilitating a world-wide conversation on almost every subject including religion, and nearly everyone can participate. This modern equivalent of the printing press is not reserved only for the elite.

Leinster made one of the first descriptions of a personal computer (called a "logic") in science fiction

Leinster envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and even commerce

Information runs rampant as every logic worldwide crunches away at problems too vast in scope for human minds to have attempted. Societal chaos quickly ensues, the situation became critical.