The Amateur

Computerist

summer 2008 ‘Across the Great Wall’ Volume 16 No. 2

Table of Contents

Celebration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 1

Panel Discussion.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 5

Werner Zorn Interview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 23

Cordial Thanks to our Friends.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 25

Steps Toward China on the Internet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 28

Netizens and the New News. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 31

Conference Presentation Videos Online.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 44

Context for the Spread of CSNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 45

Netizen Journalism: An Interview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 55

Webpage:

http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn16-2.pdf

Celebration

The First E-mail Message from China to CSNET

A celebration of the 20

anniversary of the first e-mail message that

was sent from China to the world via the international Computer Science

Network (CSNET) was held at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam

Germany on September 18-19, 2007. Participating were international

Internet pioneers, representatives of the Internet in China and historians

and journalists.

From 1983 to 1987, two teams of scientists and engineers worked

to overcome the technical, financial, and geographic obstacles to set up

an e-mail connection between China and the international CSNET. One

Webpage: http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/

Page 1

(Composed 14 Sept 1987, sent 20 Sept 1987)

team was centered around Werner Zorn at Karlsruhe University in the

Federal Republic of Germany. The other team was under the general

guidance of Wang Yuenfung at the Institute for Computer Applications

(ICA) in the People’s Republic of China. The project succeeded based

on the scientific and technical skill and friendship, resourcefulness and

dedication of the members of both teams.

The first successful e-mail message was sent on Sept. 20, 1987 from

Beijing to computer scientists in Germany, the U.S. and Ireland. The

China-CSNET connection was granted official recognition and approval

on Nov. 8, 1987, when a letter signed by the Director of the U.S.

National Science Foundation Division of Networking and Communica-

tions Research and Infrastructure Stephen Wolff was forwarded to the

head of the Chinese delegation, Yang Chuquan at an International

Networkshop in the U.S. From then on more and more of the scientific

community in China had the possibility of e-mail contact with their

colleagues and friends throughout the world. In 1994 via a connection

between China and the U.S., China established full general Internet

connectivity beyond just e-mail.

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But there is more to the story of the first e-mail message.

Over the years, especially since the middle 1990s, Internet access

and Internet use has spread throughout China. Celebrations have

occasionally been held to mark milestones of Internet history in China.

But curiously, the role of Werner Zorn and Wang Yuenfung was absent

or minimized in the telling of the early roots of the Chinese connection

to the Internet.

In 2004, two Amateur Computerist editors located and interviewed

Werner Zorn in Berlin. He shared his memories of the events of 1983 to

1987 and backed his memories up with documents from that period. One

editor took up to write an article about this history. His research took

him mostly to web sites in China. The story told there gave most credit

for the China-CSNET connection to a Chinese engineer, Qian Tianbai

whom Zorn had hardly mentioned. Mostly missing from the history on

the websites in China was the international component which Zorn had

stressed.

Qian Tianbai’s name is not among the 13 signatures on the first e-

mail message and there was evidence that he was not in China at the

time. Zorn was able to provide a copy of the letter signed by Stephen

Wolff. Through further digging and via e-mail correspondence with two

of the Chinese signatories of the first e-mail message, it was possible to

corroborate Zorn’s telling of the events.

An article was written and published in the Amateur Computerist

telling the corroborated story of the first e-mail from China to CSNET

giving justified credit to Wang and Zorn and their teams and to

Lawrence Landweber of the CSNET and Stephen Wolff. A bit later Zorn

was invited to tell the story at a panel planned for Nov 2005 in conjunc-

tion with the United Nations World Summit on Information Society

(WSIS) in Tunis.

Present in Tunis when Zorn presented his telling of the international

effort and collaboration especially between himself and Wang Yuenfung

was Madame Hu Qiheng, Vice President, China Association for Science

and Technology, and Chair of Internet Society of China. She rose and

spoke of her friendship with Qian Tianbai but said she would investigate

why the story told in China differed from the one Zorn told. Eighteen

months later, entries on the official CNNIC website Internet Time-line

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of China 1987~1996 were changed to give proper credit to the work of

Zorn and Wang, their teams and the international effort that made

possible the first e-mail connectivity between China and the world via

CSNET. http://www.cnnic.net.cn/html/Dir/2003/12/12/2000.htm

So on Sept. 18 and 19, 2007, the celebration was held with Hu

Qiheng, Werner Zorn, Lawrence Landweber, Stephen Wolff and others

participating. It was the 20

anniversary of the first e-mail message and

a time when the same history was recognized in Germany and China. As

Hu Qiheng said in her presentation,

The international collaboration in science and technology is the

driving force for computer networking across the country borders

and facilitating the early Internet development in China. Among

them the collaborations of CANET [China Academic Network] of

China with Karlsruhe University and the CSNET, BITNET of the

U.S. had contributed directly to the introduction of Internet into

China.

The achievement of the CSNET e-mail connectivity with China was

based on the collaboration of Professors Zorn and Wang and their teams.

The achievement of an accurate telling of that history in China was the

result of collaboration of Professor Zorn and Mdm. Hu. Both these

achievements were celebrated in Potsdam in September 2007. This issue

of the Amateur Computerist gathers some documents from that

celebration.

The story of this first e-mail message has been told in the Amateur Computerist*. A

video presentation by Werner Zorn of this history can be viewed at

http://www.tele-

task.de/page50_lecture3202.html.

*[See

http://ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn13-1.pdf and http://ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn15-2.pdf] .

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[Editor’s note: The following is an edited transcript of the panel of

Internet pioneers at the Potsdam celebration.]

Panel Discussion: The

Road to the First E-mail*

Date: September 19, 2007

Location: Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam Germany

Moderator: Dennis Jennings, first director of the U.S.

National Science Foundation Net (NSFNET)

Panel:

Jay Hauben, Internet historian, Amateur Computerist Newsletter Editor

Prof. Hu Qiheng, Chairwoman Internet Society of China (ISC), Honorary Member of

China Association for Science and Technology, member of Chinese Academy of

Engineering and the Chair of Steering Committee for CNNIC

Daniel Karrenberg, Chairman Board of Trustees of the Internet Society (ISOC)

Prof. Lawrence H. Landweber, Co-Founder of the Computer Science Net (CSNET)

Dr. Stephen S. Wolff, second director of the National Science Foundation Net

(NSFNET)

Prof. Werner Zorn, Hasso Plattner Institute

Zorn: Hello. I welcome you and welcome the panel. I want to introduce

a little the persons on the panel.

I start with Dennis Jennings. He is sitting in the middle. Because of

his smart Irish/English accent, I chose him to chair the panel. He was so

friendly he could not resist and say he would not do the job. But he is

also a very important person in networking. Dennis was the director of

EARN, the IBM driven or based European Academic Research Network

in the 1980s. So Europe was for a while his job. Underneath him were

the directors in the different countries. Then his most prominent job was

the project leader of the NSFNET project in 1986-1987, the supercom-

puter network in the United States. He came from Dublin and spent a

year there.

Jennings: Fifteen months.

Zorn: Fifteen months. You see, he is one of the cornerstones in

networking.

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Larry Landweber is for me the father of scientific networking. He

ran the International Academic Networkshops. He was one of the

founders, perhaps the originator of the CSNET idea in the early 1980s,

propagating the idea of connecting all the different networks first

through e-mail and then migrating to other services. Larry organized

these academic networkshops every year in different places. So he gave

me the chance to also travel around the world. It was very nice and also

very productive. Larry was later president of the Internet Society for two

years in the early ‘90s after Vint Cerf. Larry became our good friend. So

and helped us, backed me, behind the stage.

Stephen Wolff was director of the networking network project within

the National Science Foundation for ten years, a long time during the

important years in the ‘80s and also in the ‘90s. Steve gave that

important signature

to us. He represented the policy from the NSF side

toward networking. We will ask him later why his signature was so

important. What would we have done without it? It was one of my

questions. And he is now with Cisco for five years.

Daniel Karrenberg is originally coming from Dortmund.

Dortmund

was a second source besides Karlsruhe.

We were two friendly con-

nected institutes. Dortmund was origin coming from the Unix network

side and Karlsruhe by CSNET. Daniel emigrated quite early to the

Netherlands. We may ask why you emigrated and went to the Center for

Mathematics and Informatics (CWI) in the Netherlands, the Institute

which later ran the RIPE registry which became one of the most

important registries in the world. RIPE covers 30% of all IP addresses,

very important, which cover a big part of the northern hemisphere.

Stephen and Daniel have been honored with the John Postal Award,

Stephen in 2002 and Daniel in 2001. Is that correct?

Karrenberg: 2001, I believe. I am not sure.

Zorn: I think you were honored because of everything, both running

services and also for your contribution in the IETF with the RFCs to

prolong the life time of IPv4 address space through Classless Inter-

Domain Routing (CIDA). That was one very big contribution. The

Internet is alive more than ten years later because CIDA solved a

problem threatening the Internet. You can perhaps say a few words to

that.

Page 6

And Stephen Wolff of course for his important role with a big

governmental project.

Madame Qiheng Hu has introduced herself through her speeches

while the others were only sitting and listening. She is the president of

what I guess very soon will be the largest Internet Society of the world.

Hu: The Internet Society of China which began in 2001.

Zorn: China has more than 160 million Internet participants.

I think Mdm. Hu entered networking in 1994. Was that the year

when you entered into network management?

Hu: Not really management, merely I was among the people who did

urge the Internet to enter China.

Then in 1994, with your help, Prof. Zorn, we moved the .cn domain

name server from Karlsruhe University to China where it started to work

on May, 1. In 1997 the CNNIC was approved by the Chinese govern-

mental authority. The number of Chinese people online started to grow

fast. In May 2001 we established the Internet Society of China, and, to

our great honor, we successfully hosted the 2002 ISOC Conference in

Shanghai. Today, the number of Internet users in China approaches 200

million.

Zorn: Last, before I sit here modestly, I want to introduce Jay.

Jay Hauben helped me to bring our story into recognition and he

plays a role of a historian here on the panel. He is at the Columbia

University and edits the Amateur Computerist newsletter or magazine.

And Ronda Hauben will give a speech on Netizens this afternoon. She

coauthored a book about netizens.

Jay is the most, most accurate writer and researcher I ever met. For,

whatever I said, he answered, “Prove it.” So I had to set up all the

contacts through my old Chinese friends and get material out of my

archives. And he pushed and pushed and pushed me. And finally he

believed what I said. But I had to prove everything. And now on the

panel his role will be to raise a finger and say all what you do should be

written down otherwise it will be forgotten. That is also maybe one of

the topics of our discussion, to keep that in mind, and on paper not only

on CDs.

OK. So far my introduction so you will know why these people are

all my companions in different stages of what I did. I am really happy

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that you all came here. Without any one of you, we would not have

completed that route. So I really feel happy now to have everybody here

that you saw in my slides. Everyone is here exact perhaps Dave Farber

but he was a little bit further from me. Now I want to express my thanks

again that you have come so we can have a small but very high level

Internet summit. Would you agree?

One more question. Most of us met last at the Internet Society yearly

conference in Washington in 2002. I think that was the last INET

conference. Why wasn’t the tradition continued?

Landweber: I think that their time had passed.

Zorn: That’s an interesting point.

OK. Now I stop with the introductions and sit here. And Dennis, it

is your turn now.

Jennings: Werner, thank you very much indeed. And thank you for

managing all those introductions which saved me a tremendous amount

of work as the moderator of this panel.

First of all, my apologies. I speak neither German nor Chinese. So

I will speak in English and I’ll do my best to be understood.

It occurs to me, as I look around and as I talk to people young and

indeed old that now use the Internet, that most people just simply

assume the Internet is there. It works. All the things that we use, that

they use day to day has always been there as far as they are concerned.

And they have no conception of the background or the history or the

struggles that went into creating this thing called the Internet. That’s the

first question I would like to put to each member of the panel. What now

seems so simple and so obvious, Larry, was it always like this or were

there, was it different? What are the war stories behind the story?

Landweber: If we go back to the 1980s, early 1980s, there was a

research project that DARPA

had supported that developed TCP/IP. But

there was no Internet. In the early 1980s, the U.S. Defense Department

and the National Science Foundation were interested in exploring

building the Internet. On the other hand, there was an international

Page 8

standards effort called OSI for Open Systems Interconnection and

officially every government in the world except perhaps Finland sup-

ported the OSI effort. Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars

were spent on the development of a protocol suite that would become

international standards. And most countries of the world, the national

science foundations would not put money into internet development

including in Germany and also the United States except for the Defense

Department, NSF and maybe the Department of Energy. There was very

little support for the Internet. Companies like IBM and Digital Equip-

ment were actively not supportive of the Internet. So in fact there was

a major struggle to get the Internet supported, Internet development and

the building of testbeds initially.

Should I keep going for a few minutes?

Jennings: Yes, please.

Landweber: So here we are in the 1980s and the Internet is really a

stepchild and not very far along. Well, myself, Dave Farber, a couple of

others proposed CSNET

and CSNET was funded by the National

Science Foundation. Soon after, I went to Bob Kahn who was the

DARPA person (of Cerf and Kahn, who first conceived of the TCP/IP

protocol). Bob gave us permission to set up international gateways so

that e-mail and other connections from other parts of the world would

allow data to flow into the U.S. networks including the ARPAnet and

other Internet connected networks. One of the very first connections we

made was to Germany. I never throw anything out so I have early e-mail

from 1983 that I think is the first e-mail I got from you, Werner, asking

about a connection to Germany from CSNET. And we approved the

gateway and worked on it. Now there were problems. Werner has talked

about the technical problems. I mean everything was flakey. The

software we had for supporting Internet protocols was not robust. The

network connections were not robust. As you heard, he had to tie

together a satellite link, and X.25 links and then go across to the United

States and use this PMDF which was mail relay software. So it was not

trivial technically.

But I guess as hard, maybe harder were the political problems. So,

in the United States, Stephen Wolff gave us permission to have the

gateway to China in 1987. What was not mentioned was the next day he

Page 9

told us permission was revoked. It was the White House that had inter-

vened and told Steve that permission was not to be given. And Steve had

this wonderful philosophy which helped make the NSFNET so success-

ful. Which was, you don’t ask permission in advance. You ask forgive-

ness afterwards. And so he, I think, maybe winked at us and we also

decided well it’s just the White House and we’re academics. The White

House, we can ignore them. So we actually ignored the order to turn off

the connection to China and that was something that I think was very

important.

But then there also were political problems that we experienced with

Germany which maybe Werner is not completely familiar with. I was

getting messages from DFN, the German National Network. DFN was

100% behind the OSI effort. Very, very large amounts of money were

being spent by DFN with German industry and universities to develop

the OSI protocols. Sometime around 1986 or 87, I started getting

messages from DFN people asking us to disconnect the gateway to

Karlsruhe and connect directly to DFN. My view is that you support the

people who have done the work and who are the good people. And in

fact the workshops that I organized each year were set up to bring the

visionaries from each country together, the people who really were

beginning to investigate the Internet. In Germany that was Werner Zorn.

And so CSNET refused to do the disconnection. I never throw anything

out so I went and read all the e-mails which were asking me to do that.

So there were political problems also. We learned a number of lessons

from this activity.

Jennings: Daniel, can you pick that up because certainly I remember the

protocol wars. One of the astonishing things was not just the amount of

money that Larry has referred to, but the viciousness, the interpersonal

fighting that went on. The people were trying actively to disrupt non OSI

actively. Daniel, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Karrenberg: OK, I’ll talk a little about that but I won’t go into the

fighting part. But first just to explain a little bit the question about “Was

it obvious?” No, it was not obvious. I was in a place. I was a student, an

undergraduate student in Dortmund. The only thing we wanted was e-

mail. We didn’t have any sort of political agenda or whatever, no vision.

We just wanted e-mail. We did not have any money. We still wanted e-

Page 10

mail. And we found some allies in the Computer Science department

there. They had some visiting professors who actually said we will only

come to Dortmund if there is e-mail. This was in 1982, I believe ‘81, ‘82

timeframe. And we were also running Unix at the time which wasn’t

quite so popular and we were only allowed to do that at night. During

the daytime the computers were used for serious purposes. In the

evenings we could do Unix. And at that time we heard about this Unix

network, this UUCP network that was going on. We had all the software,

so we didn’t have that problem. But how do you connect? How do you

connect internationally? The only way we could do that was through the

telephone, very much like Werner’s first attempt to do the China thing.

We had a little bit of an easier task because we only had to connect

to the next country, the Netherlands. And we did that. We found some

modems and connected to them and got our e-mail and our net use.

At some point the phone bills were so significant at the departmental

level and questions were asked. And we explained and that was fine.

Then other places in Germany running Unix also wanted to connect and

they connected to us. This was purely ‘store and forward.’ Your e-mail

mail would take a day to get somewhere because it had to be written on

one computer, stored there. They had to make a telephone connection,

stored on the next computer, store and forward. We could have e-mail

conversations with like-minded people in the U.S. for instance that

would be a message a day. But that was tremendous. I mean compared

to postal mail and so forth. That was fine.

At some point this grew and I remember very vividly how we were

trying to find ways of actually keeping it going financially. It was very,

very difficult in those times. And if you are sitting in an institute like

this, it’s hard to imagine but twenty years ago, more than 20 years ago

universities were basically state institutions, run by state rules, run by

national rules and run by civil servants. It was incredibly hard to take

money into those places, especially if it wasn’t like for big projects, it

was just to pay the phone bill. And so we had to overcome that kind of

thing. And the next thing was we had to break the law because at some

point we wanted faster speed and automatic dialing so that when the

international phone rates became cheaper, I think it was 10:00 p.m. or

11:00 p.m. at the time, we would not have to go into the computer room

Page 11

and actually dial Amsterdam. So we wanted an autodialer and we

wanted quicker modems. And it was actually on the statute books a

crime or an offence, I’m not sure. The title of the law, the German title

of the law is Fernmeldeanlagengesetz I don’t know whether it still

exists. But it was a criminal offense to connect anything that was not

approved by the state run PTT to the telephone network. And we were

doing like OK do we really want this? There is approved equipment but

it is way beyond our budget. So we went to our director, Dr. Rudolf

Pater, who is one of the other unsung heroes of this and said we have

this problem. He said, “ya, we don’t have the budget.” We said we have

this other solution. We know it works. We know it won’t break the

phone system. They use it in the Netherlands. Can we use that? And he

said, “I don’t want to know about it.” So we said we want to buy it and

it’s not that cheap. It was like about what today would be 2 or 3 personal

computers worth of money. And we said we have already talked to some

of the visiting professors and some of the other academics and we will

just all chip-in and we will buy it. He said, “Na, let me see.” And then

sort of magically a week later we were asked, what is the specification

of this stuff? Where can we buy it? And it was actually bought with

public money. And I never know what it was supposed to be that we

ordered there. That kind of stuff. And that kind of stuff is really the

resistance that you have to overcome. And then the criminal offence too.

And all these kinds of things. And of course, we also had this experience

when this grew and had like 50, 60, 70, 80 places connected in

Germany, we faced resistance like, “You are not doing the right thing.

You are just making things work. We want to do the politically correct

thing.” And we were a bit more resilient to the kind of approach that

Larry just related because we were actually funded by a big number of

participants and we weren’t in that sense part of the academic establish-

ment. But it was quite clear that there was tremendous pressure put on

the university to actually either stop this altogether or play it down. Dr.

Pater was one of the people who actually resisted that.

Page 12

Can I do one more minute?

Jennings: Yes, please.

Karrenberg: One day, we have this meeting every week to see how

things are going with the networks thing and he goes I got a letter from

the dean of the department. He commends us on our good work

facilitating the visiting professors and all that kind of stuff. And he is

really happy with what we are doing. This is fine.

At the same time I was in another function. I was a student represen-

tative in university government. Two weeks later in my pile of papers

this same letter appears. And at the end there is a paragraph that says,

“and by the way you are not supposed to become the German central

hub of this.” So I see this and go hmmm and take the letter and go to Dr.

Pater’s office and say, “Hey, did you miss the last paragraph?” And he

goes like, “One, two, three, …Daniel, I chose to ignore that.”

Jennings: Steve, tell us about what you chose to ignore.

Wolff: It was not as much a matter of ignoring things as trying to make

it obvious to the right people. You see, by the time I got to the NSF after

Dennis had broken the soil, the notion of the Internet was obvious to

computer scientists because they had CSNET. They knew it worked.

They knew what it would do. It was obvious to university IT depart-

ments because they had BITNET. They knew what it could do. And it

was obvious to computational physicists because they had MFENET and

NSFNET and they knew what it could do. But in total, that’s a very

small population. And in fact people who ran much of the NSFNET, the

regional networks were based in state run universities and many of them

had bet their careers and their jobs on making the network work. So part

of my job was to make it obvious to the people who gave them money.

So I spent a great deal of time talking to associations of state governors,

to a group of comptrollers of states telling them that the money was not

being badly sent. So most of my job was actually marketing, trying to

convince people that this was a good thing and the money was not being

wasted.

It seems as though each consistency had its own vision of what the

network was going to do. I’m not sure what computer scientists thought

about it. It was very clear what IT professionals wanted from it. And, it

was perfectly obvious what computational physicists wanted out of the

Page 13

network. And they haven’t changed in twenty years. They wanted more,

faster. But what is clear to me now is that the essential thing is that

everyone has a vision. The hardest part of my job was trying to

communicate that vision to sufficiently many communities so it would

catch hold somewhere.

Jennings: Werner, let’s come back to you. Tell us a little bit of the battle

in Germany.

Zorn: Larry told something about the political pressure in the ‘80s.

When we started with the services, we expected that everybody would

be happy in the German networking community. But especially in the

German Research Network, the DFN, just the opposite was the case. I

asked myself, what, what is going on here? We succeeded in our project

but then those who gave the money or has the job to do that refused to

accept that. That was the signal that something is wrong in the system.

I was convinced that if their position is wrong ours must be better or

right. So it was really a thing between right and wrong. And of course

we were fighting for our way. Steve’s philosophy, Larry told us, was,

don’t ask for permission before but ask for forgiveness after. It was the

same thing except I did not ask for forgiveness. It was a criminal act to

sign the contract with Larry. Perhaps I did not read it completely, but on

that little sheet of paper was written that you are allowed to use our

software and install it and run the services for the whole Germany. So

that was the thing that we were the only one, the only installation, as

Daniel had been in Dortmund for the Unix community. And that was the

thing that upset the DFN who thought they were the institution, the only

one being legalized to do that job. That was a total misunderstanding of

what open system means, by the way. Open system does not only mean

to use open protocols but also to let the things grow bottom up and not

any more top down. That’s why we were convinced we were right with

our approach and Larry backed us of course. If he would have drawn the

plug we would have been lost of course.

But on the other end, from the technical side we were faster

developing the infrastructure than they could follow. That was the real

Page 14

thing. Right? If you have an isolated service somebody can say migrate

it to a different installation. Move it there and hosting is done there the

next day. But it became so complex. Perhaps it was visible on one of the

charts, what was the route that the GND was supposed to take over.

They refused. Because they said they were not able to run it without any

interruption. It was clear if the e-mail service would not run for two days

the users would really give, run a big protest. And so we worked in

parallel and then reached the good end where we moved to the full

Internet suite in 1989.

And then we thought the game is over, the battle is over. But then

DFN moved to TCP and did the same game but then concentrated on

Dortmund and really got vulgar with DENIC, the registry for Germany.

Then the Dortmund people had to fight and I could observe what

happens.

A mixture of thinking, having the right vision or the right way and

doing technical development faster than them helped us to survive.

Wolff: Your biggest sin was success.

Jennings: This is the extraordinary thing, that Steve just said is that the

biggest sin was that everyone who was doing this work at the time was

doing it sort of unofficially outside the official European government,

European Union funded Open Systems Interconnection approach to

networking and outside the approaches that were approved by the PPTs.

Let me tell you just a little bit about the PPTs. Back in ‘83 when the

early EARN leased lines were connected and that’s EARN, the

European Academic Research Network, the European part of BITNET

that I was involved in. The France Telecom installed their end of the line

to Rome, one of the major links and they issued the bill for it. But they

refused to connect it because of the issue called “passing of third party

traffic.” It was against the law for one party to take traffic, a party, the

third party, to take traffic from the first party and pass it on to another

party. Get this right. To take first party….

Karrenberg: It was illegal to compete with the PPT.

Jennings: That’s the summary. It was illegal to compete with the PTTs

in every aspect of communication. In fact in Ireland the law was so

Page 15

written that technically it was illegal to speak and to use the air between

people to communicate because that was actually covered by the

communications act. So it was a regulatory environment that was very

hostile then to doing ad hoc things that actually worked and that con-

tinued on.

Jay, as a historian what lessons do you draw from this early history

of the 80s?

Hauben: I think the lesson to draw is to realize that first there was a

vision, a deep vision, from J. C. R. Licklider and the people in the 60s.

That vision was of the Intergalactic network. Somehow, by connecting

a few, you were eventually going to connect everybody. But it’s also

true if anything good ever happened it is because some good people

worked very hard over a very long period of time to overcome the

obstacles. I think we know something real happened because it was so

hard to get there. I think each of these stories contributes to the fact that

despite the obstacles people have an understanding that what they are

doing is sufficiently valuable and important that they will continue

trying to do it. The job for the historian to gather up these pieces which

are not very well documented and put them together to show the grand

flow that has come forward.

The surprising thing was that when Werner told me the China e-mail

story, it was a good story but is it exactly accurate? So I looked on the

Internet and in books. I found that there was a totally different story

being told that didn’t have an international component. For whatever

reason, the main essence of the first e-mail China story, which was that

all of this activity was international, was missing in the telling of it. To

clear that up it required digging. When I dug I found Werner was telling

it straight.

I think the value of what we are doing here is we are hearing from

some of the pioneers. So we are getting the clues of how to get the

history right. It is very important that the stories be known and be told

and be gathered up. So I hope there will be more panels like this one.

Jennings: Excellent. Larry, tell us a little bit about the Landweber

Networkshops because those networkshops were key.

Page 16

Landweber: Go back to 1982. I went to a meeting in London that Peter

Kirstein had. And I hadn’t traveled very much and I decided, gee

wouldn’t it be nice to see more parts of the world. I had been a theoreti-

cian. Mostly I went to one conference a year or two conferences a year.

But now I had gotten involved in CSNET and had switched my work to

networking sometime in the 70s. And it was exciting and by coincidence

I started being in contact with people around the world who were

thinking about national networks, sometimes the Internet, sometimes

like EUNET, and sometimes EARN, BITNET and there was no easy

way for people to communicate. So what I did was try to identify one or

two people in each country. As we went along the number of countries

expanded. So that we brought them together once a year in a nice place

and spent several days exchanging ideas, exchanging software, talking

about plans and it was a way of supporting the continuing development

of the network. Daniel was at, you were at a couple of these, right? I

think Dennis was. I met Dennis 1984 in Paris and Werner was and Steve

was (were you at, no maybe you weren’t) 1984. And so gradually, first

it was people from North America and Europe. Then there were some

people from Latin America. Then there was Kilnam Chon from Korea,

Then there was Jun Murai from Japan. And then there was Florencio

Utreras from Chile, etc., etc. We just gradually–Juha Heinänen from

Finland and gradually we expanded and it built a community and that

community was very important for sharing ideas. Might I add one more

thing?

Jennings: Please.

Landweber: OK. For me all of this has a real important geopolitical,

economic, global lesson. And it is that governments have no role in

deciding which technologies are superior to other technologies. That’s

the lesson. In the case of the OSI activity, governments around the world

spent billions of dollars in an effort to build a technology that was poorly

conceived and not well executed in planning it. They very actively

objected to and worked against the Internet.

Now, a former student of mine was at the European Commission and

at one point he was in charge of supporting networking at the Commis-

sion. I always used to make a point of thanking him whenever I saw him

because through his efforts he helped American industry. I mean, if you

Page 17

go back to 1980, U.S. industry, European industry, Japanese industry

were on an equal par when it came to telecommunications. Governments

around the world by suppressing the creativity of their industry relating

to the Internet made it possible for the major companies in the Internet

field to initially develop in the United States. And I think it significantly

for a period hurt their economies. And so this is something I hope will

be written some times by historians as a lesson. There is a wonderful

paper by François Fluckiger from CERN which discusses this. It’s about

10 years old,

Jennings: Fifteen.

Landweber: fifteen years old which actually talks about the European

experience. That’s the lesson, the global lesson that I have from this.

Jennings: Steve, pick that up. Governments shouldn’t mandate

technology? Isn’t that what we did in the NSF? Didn’t we, didn’t I go

around and particularly say it has to be TCP/IP?

Landweber: No. No.

Wolff: But we did that. Yes. But we were lucky.

Landweber: May I interject.

Jennings: You may.

Landweber: There was a battle. The NSFnet by accident became

Internet. There was a committee and if there was a battle, the physicists

wanted DECNET. They wanted to have connections from their

universities to supercomputer centers and they wanted DECNET. They

didn’t want Internet. There were a few people, like Ken Wilson, the

Nobel Prize winner who wanted Internet. And so there really was also

within the U.S. government…. You were there when that was happen-

ing.

Jennings: I fought that happening.

Landweber: and so it wasn’t obvious that Internet was going to be the

backbone of the NSFnet.

Jennings: But Steve

Wolff: No, it wasn’t obvious. But it was a battle that, Dennis, you fought

and I fought as well because I think it was clear to us where the smart

Page 18

people were. It is usually a good bet to ally yourself with intelligent

people and it seemed to us that the most intelligent people were those

who were explaining why TCP/IP were good protocols and what the

difficulties were with DECNET and the other various protocols which

were being touted at the time.

But I wanted to say something to Jay. I am trying to remember the

source of a quote which I think is relevant to your activities. It’s from a

German author and I do not know the German but the English transla-

tion goes something like this: Those things and deeds which are not

written down are condemned to oblivion and given over to a sepulcher

of darkness.

Larry, I am very grateful to you for not having thrown anything

away because the original source material is all that we have to

reconstruct the actual history.

Jennings: Daniel can you give us a quick comment because it is coming

toward the time. Given that we have talked about all the difficulties, all

the battles, how did the Internet actually come to Europe?

Karrenberg: Oh, that’s a tall order. [I think] Let me deviate slightly but

still have some essence into the story. I think it came many, many ways.

The thing about, one of the reasons the TCP/IP protocols were better

than others is that they allowed the network to grow without any central

authority, without any central control, central network center, or

whatever. And so people made a link here, a link there, a link there.

Werner converted his links to the U.S. I think at some point to IP. We

did the same. At some point we were just doing the store and forward

thing I talked about earlier. And then it became economical to buy

actually leased lines. Then we had the leased lines it was quite easy

actually, it was like flipping a switch to put TCP/IP on it. And we didn’t

have to ask anyone in the U.S. permission besides the people that we

were actually talking to. Whether we could connect to the NSFNET and

things like that was a different thing. But just to have this TCP/IP link,

was just you call them up or send them an e-mail actually and say hey

um tomorrow at 10:00 we switch UUCP to TCP/IP and PIP and that was

that. And then when we had more links into different countries that

Page 19

became leased lines it was very easy to convert them as well one after

another and it grew organically. And somebody else said I have an

island here that uses TCP/IP. Let’s make a link and connect the islands.

The Internet! That’s where it came from. So that’s how it came. That’s

the one reason why TCP/IP was better. The other, obviously, is that it

did not concern itself so much with the applications like any of the other

proposals did. The applications are actually outside in the end systems

rather than in the network. The physicists could do their thing over it.

The computer scientists could do their thing over it and so on.

Jennings: It was an internet.

Zorn: For me the approval by the NSF was one of the important things

for us to maintain the e-mail service to China. I am sure in China that

approval was very little known. There were many other attempts to draw

lines and links to CERN and elsewhere. Other groups tried their best to

get a connection to some situation they worked with. What would have

happened in the whole interconnected networks with BITNET and

everything around if the NSF would have said no?

Landweber: To the China link?

Zorn: To China. Politically “no.” Like you say, no nothing to North

Korea, nothing to…. Was it policy to control every network with every

exit and whatever in China? Without permission, it would be thrown

away and the links would be cut or what?

Jennings: Let me address the question and see if people agree with me.

I think what would have happened, it would have been done anyway.

Following Steve’s maxim, Yes it was nice to ask for permission and yes

it was very nice to get the permission. But I think back then we would

have done it anyway and then asked for forgiveness. And I think we

would have gotten away with it.

Wolff: Do you suppose I didn’t think that? {Laughter}

Jennings: Maybe we recognized it was going to happen anyway.

Hauben: I don’t know if anyone would have paid attention. Who down

the line would have actually said, “I am not going to pass on the e-mail

message that’s come. I am not going to do relay these e-mail messages

any more.” I don’t know which human being in the chain who had

Page 20

invested so much of his or her time and energy and spirit would have

said, “OK, I’ll be the one who doesn’t continue it.”

Landweber: If there were not even the hint of the permission and if,

remember we were depending on the Defense Department

Jennings: Yes

Landweber: Bob Kahn had I think a very similar world view to Steve

which was things happen and he was hoping the network would grow.

But if his bosses had learned of it, the people who are the real military

people, they could have made us stop.

Jennings: They were scary people back then.

Landweber: There were plenty of people and there were countries

where we would not have attempted. We would not have attempted a

link to North Korea for example in those days.

Jennings: Steve.

Wolff: One of the consequences might have been that it would have

taken longer for what happened in 1994 because the precedent set by

getting permission from the United States government for an intercon-

nection. I think and only Madame Hu can speak to this but I imagine it

set the stage for certain things to happen within China so that later when

the formal, basically the IP connection was sought that was a very

formal ceremony and it was an actual agreement between governments.

And I think that might have taken longer to happen if the stage had not

been set by the first connection.

Jennings: So Madame Hu, do you have some comments on the battles

these people fought to get the Internet going?

Hu: The description of the early days when the Internet entered China

may differentiate depending on the different events the different

individuals had been experiencing at that time but the main stream is

quite clear that the scientific research and international exchange played

the role of the engine. Also we should not leave out the High Energy

Physics Institute of CAS, with their partner, the SLAC in Stanford

University. The earlier digital communication between the latter partners

took place even for 1 year ahead of the first e-mail sent by Wang

Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and their teams to Germany, via an X.25

Page 21

telecommunication link.

Looking back to 1994, at that time my feeling was the obstacles were

not in the technology. Because the key person of our technology team,

Professor Qian Hualin and others, told me that they had full success in

the test with Sprint. There were no technical obstacles. Everything is

ready. Just the gate is still closed somehow. So I remember very clearly

when I came to Dr. Neal Lane, the NSF Director at that time, to ask for

help. That was in the early April, when I was in Washington DC as a

member of the China delegation attending the U.S.-China Combined

Committee Meeting on the collaboration in Science and Technology

between the two countries. Dr. Neal Lane immediately made a chance

for me to talk with Stephen Wolff. Stephen just told me, “Don’t worry.

No problem. You will be connected to the Internet.” I was not very sure

about that. I asked him, is it that simple? He said yes it is simple. No

contract, no sign, no document, the only document we had provided

before that was the AUP (Accepted Use Policy. And then after a few

days I got the news from my colleagues in China that the connection is

done, it goes through smoothly. Everything is OK. Then I thought, “Oh,

Steve Wolff is really great!” This man had a magic stick. The magic

stick pointed and the gate opened. Is it that simple? I guess it is.

Jennings: On what better note to end.

With all the hard work and all the battles, at the end of the day it

took a little magic to make this fit together and to forge the links to

China to enable the first e-mail twenty years ago from China to the rest

of the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Panel, thank you very much indeed.

{Applause}

*Transcribed from the video at:

http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3204.html. Slightly edited

by some of the participants.

Page 22

[Editor’s note: The following is a news report, on Xinhuanet, based on

an interview with Werner Zorn, Berlin, Sept. 19, 2007.]

“Across the Great Wall We Can Reach

Every Corner in the World.”

by Liming Wu

(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail message sent from Beijing abroad on Sept. 20,

1987. This also means that the internet era knocked on the door of

China.

Professor Werner Zorn, who was then a computer science professor

at the University Karlsruhe in Germany and who sent this first e-mail

from China 20 years ago, told the journalists when he was interviewed

by the Xinhuanet:

In September 1987, Professor Zorn visited Beijing for a scientific

conference. After four years of preparatory work and two weeks of

extremely hard tests the joint German-Chinese team successfully

connected the Beijing Institute of Computer Application (ICA) and the

computing centre of University Karlsruhe. On Sept. 20, he made the

draft of this first e-mail and together with Professor Yunfeng Wang

successfully sent it to one of the computers at the University Karlsruhe.

Prof. Zorn, who helped China to get into internet, remembered: “The

first response to the mail came from an American computer science

professor Larry Landweber. Later on there were more and more

responses from all over the world.”

Professor Zorn is known as the father of the Internet in Germany.

Germany entered the Internet on Aug. 2, 1984 with the first e-mail

received by Prof. Zorn from CSNET. In 2006 Zorn was awarded the

Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts.

Prof. Zorn recalled that it was out of the simple wish to facilitate the

communication between the computer science professionals to connect

the computer networks from both countries. A letter required at that time

Page 23

at least eight days and telephone or telegraph was extremely expensive.

After the first success to help China to get into the internet, Prof.

Zorn continued to help China with its development. On Nov. 28, 1990,

Prof Zorn registered .CN domain name for China, and set the primary

DNS server in University Karlsruhe. This server was handed over to

China in 1994.

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-making meaning of the first e-

mail sent from China. “It was a sensational event.” But what the internet

means today, was out of his imagination at that time.

Twenty years later, e-mail has become the most popular communica-

tion media now. China, with 162 million internet users, is the second

largest internet country after U.S.A. The internet has become an

indispensable part of life for many Chinese people and the internet

technology is enjoying a dramatic boom.

Twenty years have passed. Prof. Yunfeng Wang, who worked

together with Prof. Zorn to get China on the internet, passed away ten

years ago. Prof. Zorn is now 64 years old and would retire soon. What

comforts him is, that the Chinese People have not forgotten him. Zorn

said, he often got invitations to visit China.

On Sept. 18 dozens of scholars worldwide gathered at the University

of Potsdam, in Germany, to celebrate the 20

anniversary of the Chinese

internet. Professor Qiheng Hu presented in the name of the Chinese

internet community a crystal award to Prof. Zorn. On the crystal award

is inscribed:

We hereby present our sincere appreciation to Professor Werner

Zorn, for your invaluable support to Internet’s early develop-

ment in China.

Page 24

[Editor’s note: The following is a speach given on Sept 18, 2007 at the

event to commemorate the 20

anniversary of the first e-mail sent from

China to Germany.]

Cordial Thanks to Our Friends

by Qiheng Hu

Internet Society of China, CNNIC

International collaborations in science and technology are the driving

forces for computer networking across country borders and facilitated

early Internet development in China. Among them, the collaborations of

CANET of China with Karlsruhe University in Germany and the

CSNET, BITNET of the U.S. contributed directly to the introduction of

the Internet into China.

China connected to CSNET and BITNET, and the first e-

mail sent from China to Germany

Professor Werner Zorn attended the first CASCO Conference of

1983 in Beijing. To reduce the cost of data transfer between scientists,

and make the communication more effective, Prof. Zorn thought of the

possibility of computer connection with Chinese counterparts. The major

collaborator was a team led by Professor Wang Yuen Fung of the

Institute of Computer Application (ICA), China.

In July 1985 Prof. Zorn wrote a letter to the former Chief Officer of

Baden-Wurttemberg and suggested the program with budget application.

In Autumn 1985 the budget was approved.

In 1987 the connection between Germany and China had had some

troubles, Zorn asked for help from the CSNET International Collabora-

tion Division Leader, Lawrence H. Landweber. In September 1987 Zorn

arrived at Beijing to test the connection with the software CSNET-

BS2000 which was authorized by Lawrence H. Landweber. November

1987 the project for computer connection between China and the U.S.A.

suggested by Executive Chairman of CSNET David Farber and Dr.

Landweber was approved by the NSF.

With the support from a team at Karlsruhe University led by Prof.

Page 25

Werner Zorn, the group in the Institute of Computer Application in

Beijing led by Prof. Wang Yuenfung and Dr. Li Chengjiong built up an

e-mail node in ICA, and successfully sent out an e-mail on September

20 of 1987 to Germany. The e-mail title was: “Across the Great Wall we

can reach every corner in the world.”

In November 1987 a Chinese delegation was invited to participate

in the 6

international network workshop held in Princeton. During the

conference a congratulatory letter from NSF recognizing the connection

of China into the CSNET and BITNET of the U.S., signed by Dr.

Stephen Wolff, was forwarded to the head of delegation, Mr. Yang

Chuquan.

Registration of the ccTLD .cn

In October 1990 Prof. Wang Yuen Fung on behalf of the ICA,

authorized Dr. Zorn to register the .cn ccTLD at the InterNIC in name

of Chinese Computer Network for Science and Technology CANET.

Dr. Zorn registered .cn in 26 November 1990 and the Administrative

Liaison for ccTLD .cn was Prof. Qian Tianbai of the ICA.

Starting from 1991 the DNS server for the ccTLD .cn had been

resigned to University of Karlsruhe through a trusteeship to Dr. Zorn.

On 21 of May, 1994 CNNIC, which is located in by the Chinese

Academy of Sciences, was established and authorized by Chinese

Government to move the ccTLD server for .cn to China.

China connected to the Internet: April 1994

In June 1992 at INET’92 in Japan Prof. Qian Hualin of Chinese

Academy of Sciences visited the NSF official who was responsible for

the International relations in the Division of Computer Networks to

make the first discussion on the issue of China connecting to the

Internet.

At INET’93 of June 1993, Chinese participants repeated the request

of connecting to the Internet. After INET’93 Prof. Qian Hualin attended

the CCIRN (Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research

Networking) that made a special topic in the program the issue of China

Page 26

connecting to the Internet. The dominant response was strongly

supportive.

In April 1994 Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Dr. Hu Qiheng visited the NSF to meet with Dr. Neal Lane and Dr.

Stephen Wolff, appealing for the China connection to the Internet

backbone. The request was fully supported by the NSF.

On 20 of April 1994 China at last succeeded to make a full-function

connection onto the Internet.

For all the support and help we received from our overseas friends

during the early days development of Internet in China, today when the

Internet has greatly contributed to the Chinese economy and social

progress, we feel deeply grateful and I would like to take this opportu-

nity to extend our cordial thanks to our friends.

First of all, I’d like to thank Prof. Werner Zorn and the HPI of

Germany for providing this opportunity to me to come here to express

gratitude on behalf of the Chinese Internet Community to friends who

have provided invaluable help and have contributed to the early

development of the Internet in China.

Our sincere thanks go to Prof. Werner Zorn!

Our sincere thanks go to Dr. Stephen Wolff!

Our sincere thanks go to Dr. Lawrence Landweber!

Also we thank Dr. Daniel Karrenberg and Dr. Dennis Jenning for

their support and contributions to the early days’ Internet in China!

The Internet is changing the world, also China, opening the door to

the information society. We’re grateful to the Internet creators. We’re

grateful to the world Internet community: so many colleagues from

different corners of the world have provided their help and support for

the Internet to develop in China.

Page 27

[Editor’s note: The following article is based on an e-mail message from

Mdm Hu. A fuller account of “Growth of the Internet in China since

1987” can be viewed at http://www.tele-task.de/page50_ lecture3203.html. The slides for

this presentation are at:

http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/fileadmin/hpi/veranstaltungen/china/-

slides/070919_S1_2_HU_Internet_in_China.pdf.]

Early Steps Toward China

on the Internet

by Qiheng Hu

Internet Society of China, CNNIC

The description of the early days when the Internet entered China

may differentiate depending on the different events the different

individuals had been experiencing at that time but the main stream is

quite clear that the scientific research and international exchange played

the role of the engine. The essential motivation to connect to the Internet

was to decrease the cost of data and information exchange between the

collaborators, e.g. the Institute of Prof. Wang Yunfeng and his team,

with the Karlsruhe University in Germany, also the High Energy Physics

Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), with their partner,

the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) near San Francisco. The

earlier digital communication between the latter partners took place even

for one year ahead of the first e-mail sent by Wang Yunfeng to Ger-

many, via a X.25 telecommunication link. As one of the key persons for

the Internet entrance into China, Professor Qian Hualin told me, both of

those Institutes were connected to the world via the DECNet links. The

High Energy Physics Institute (HEPI) of CAS was linked to the Energy

Sciences Network (ESnet) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), as

the only partner from China side.

Today we can say for sure that the very first true Internet connection

in China was implemented by the triangle network of the Zhongguancun

Area, National Computing and Networking Facility of China (NCFC),

in April, 1994. The NCFC was a World bank loan project, aimed on the

Page 28

establishment of a supercomputer center, shared by the research

institutes of CAS in the Zhongguancun Area, the Tsinghua and Beijing

Universities. I was the chairperson of the Decision-making Committee

of this project. In 1993 the Committee took a decision that was the

pursuance of the researchers and teachers that we should try our best to

link to the Internet. The first demand was budget. This decision became

feasible only because the MoST (Ministry of Science and Technology)

and NSFC (National Science Foundation of China) made the financial

support for the networking beyond the NCFC budget.

The second issue is the possibility to have the acceptance from the

U.S. side. To make this issue solved, efforts have been made through all

possible diversified channels by many people, including Chinese and our

friends from other countries. Professor Qian Hualin and Ma Yinglin of

CAS participated in some of these activities. As Prof. Qian told me, in

June 1992, at the INET’92 in Japan, he had the first talk on this topic

with Mr. Steven Goldstein (at that time he was responsible for the

international connections of U.S. NSFNET) which was followed by

many talks with him later in other chances. Qian considered the most

important event the meeting convened after INET’93. Qian had talked

with Steven Goldstein, Vint Cerf, and David Farber, etc. to seek for the

understanding of the pursuance being connected into the Internet.

Professor Richard Hetherington, director of Computer and Com-

munication Department of Missouri-Kansas University was among the

foreign friends who supported our pursuance. During that time Qian

Hualin and others had many discussions with Sprint (authorized by

NSFnet for international connection) on the technical details. After the

INET’93, in Bodega Bay, San Francisco, the CCIRN (Cooperation and

Coordination for International Research Networks) took place. The issue

of the China connection was listed in the agenda. As Qian Hualin

remembered, all speakers supported the acceptance of China. Professor

Kilnam Chon, at that time the chairman of AP-CCIRN, provided a ride

to Qian Hualin, to attend this important meeting.

As the technical team leader from China side, Qian Hualin had

gotten information in early 1994 that China will be connected. The test

of the satellite channel started in March 1994 and in April 20, 1994

implemented the full-functional connection to the Internet. His feeling

Page 29

is that the final solution of the issue was somehow related with the U.S.-

China Combined Committee Meeting on the collaboration in Science

and Technology between the two countries. The U.S. side may have

wanted to enhance the friendly atmosphere for this meeting.

At that time my feeling was the obstacles were not in the technology.

Because the technology team, Professor Qian and others, told me that

they had full success in the test with Sprint. There were no technical

obstacles. Everything is ready. Just the gate is still closed somehow. So

I remember very clearly when I come up to Dr. Neal Lane, the NSF

Director at that time, to ask for help. That was in the early April, when

I was in Washington DC as a member of the China delegation attending

the U.S.-China Combined Committee Meeting on the collaboration in

Science and Technology between the two countries. Dr. Neal Lane

immediately made a chance for me to talk with Stephen Wolff. Stephen

just told me, “Don’t worry. No problem. You will be connected to the

Internet.” I was not very sure about that. I asked him, is it that simple?

He said yes it is simple. No contract, no signing, no document. The only

document we had before that was the AUP (Accepted Use Policy). And

then after a few days I got the news from my colleagues in China that

the connection is done. It goes through smoothly. Everything is OK.

Then I thought, “Oh, Stephen Wolff is really great!” This man had a

magic stick. The magic stick pointed and the gate opened. Is it that

simple? I guess it is.

Afterward, later in 1994, with the help of Prof. Zorn we moved the

“.cn” server back to China from Karsruhe University, and in 1997 the

CNNIC was approved by Chinese governmental authority. The Chinese

people online started to grow fast. In May 2001 we established the

Internet Society of China, (ISC), and, to our great honor, we successfully

hosted the 2002 ISOC Conference in Shanghai.

Page 30

[Editor’s note: The following talk was presented in Potsdam on Sept 19,

2007. A video of the presentation can be viewed at: http://www.tele-task.de/ page-

50_lecture3204.html. The slides from this presentation can be seen at:

htt p : / /ww w.hpi.uni-p otsdam .de/filea d m i n / h pi/- ver a n s t alt u n gen/c h i na/sli d es / 0 7 0 919_-

S3b_2_hauben_netizenmovement.pdf]

Netizens and the New News

The Emergence of Netizens

and Netizen Journalism

by Ronda Hauben

Part I – Introduction

I am happy to be here today and to have this chance to contribute to

this conference to celebrate the 20

anniversary of the first international

e-mail sent from China to Germany and the collaboration of researchers

that made this early e-mail communication possible.

I have been asked to speak about the Netizen movement and its

impact. The title of my talk is “Netizens and the New News: The

Emergence of Netizens and Netizen Journalism”

Part II – About Netizens

First I want to provide some background. In 1992-1993, a college

student who had gotten access to the Net wondered what the impact of

the Net would be.*

The student decided to do his research using the Net itself. He sent

out several sets of questions and received many responses. Studying the

responses, he realized something new was developing, something not

expected. What was developing was a sense among many of the people

who wrote to him that the Internet was making a difference in their lives

and that the communication it made possible with others around the

world was important.

The student discovered that there were users online who not only

cared for how the Internet could help them with their purposes, but who

wanted the Internet to continue to spread and thrive so that more and

more people around the world would have access to it.

He had seen the word ‘net.citizen’ referred to online. Thinking about

Page 31

the social concern he had found among those who wrote him, and about

the non-geographical character of a net based form of citizenship, he

contracted ‘net.citizen’ into the word ‘netizen.’ Netizen has come to

reflect the online social identity he discovered doing his research.

The student wrote a paper describing his research and the many

responses he had received. The paper was titled, “The Net and Netizens:

The Impact the Net has on People’s Lives.” This research was done in

the early to mid 1990s just at the time that the Internet was spreading to

countries and networks around the world.

The student posted his paper on several of the discussion forums

known as Usenet newsgroups and on several Internet mailing lists on

July 6, 1993. It was posted in four parts under the title “Common Sense:

The Net and Netizens: the Impact the Net is having on people’s lives.”

People around the world found his article and helped to spread it to

others. The term netizen quickly spread, not only in the online world, but

soon it was appearing in newspapers and other publications offline. The

student did other research and posted his articles online.

In January 1994, several of the articles about netizens and about the

history of the Net were collected into a book to be available via file

transfer protocol (ftp) to anyone online. The title of the book was

“Netizens and the Wonderful World of the Net.” Then in 1997 the book

titled Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet

was published in a print edition in English and soon afterwards in a

Japanese translation.

The concept and consciousness of oneself as a netizen has continued

to spread around the world. I want to mention a few of the more striking

early examples.

A netizen from Ireland put the online book into html to help it to

spread more widely.

A review of the book was done by a Romanian researcher. He

recognized that netizenship is a new development and acts as a catalyst

for the development of ever more advanced information technology.

In 1995 the student was invited to speak at a conference about

netizens and community networks in Beppu Bay on Kyushu Island in

Japan. The conference was held by the Coara Community network.

A Japanese sociologist gathered a series of articles into a book in

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Japanese titled “The Age of Netizens.” The book begins with a chapter

on the birth of the netizen.

Also in the mid 1990s a Polish researcher was doing research

connected with the European Union to try to determine what form of

citizenship would be appropriate for the E.U. Looking for a model that

might be helpful toward understanding how to develop a European-wide

form of citizenship. He found the articles about netizens online. He

recommended to E.U. officials that they would do well to consider the

model of netizenship as a model for a broader than national but also, a

participatory form of citizenship.

Among other notable events showing the impact of netizens around

the world are:

A Netizen Association formed in Iceland to keep the price of the Net

affordable.

A lexicographer in Israel who wrote a dictionary definition for a

Hebrew dictionary making certain that she described a netizen as one

who contributes to the Net.

A Congressman in the U.S. who introduced a bill into the U.S.

House of Representatives called the Netizen Protection Act to penalize

anyone sent spam on the Internet.

While the word ‘netizen’ like the word ‘citizen’ has come to have

many meanings, the student who had discovered the emergence of

netizens felt it was important to distinguish between the more general

usage that the media has promoted, that anyone online is a netizen, and

the usage the student had introduced, which reserved the title ‘netizen’

for a social identity.

In a talk he gave in Japan in 1995, the student explained:

“Netizens are not just anyone who comes online. Netizens are

especially not people who come online for individual gain or profit.

They are not people who come to the Net thinking it is a service.

Rather they are people who understand it takes effort and action on

each and everyone’s part to make the Net a regenerative and vibrant

community and resource. Netizens are people who decide to devote

time and effort into making the Net, this new part of our world, a

better place.” (Talk given at the Hypernetwork ’95 Beppu Bay

Conference in Japan)

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The second usage of netizens is the usage I am referring to as well.

In his article “The Net and the Netizens” the student proposed that

the Net “gives the power of the reporter to the Netizen.” I want to look

today at this particular aspect of netizen development by considering

some interesting examples from South Korea, Germany, the U.S. and

China.

III – South Korea and the Netizens Movement

In South Korea, over 80% of the population have access to high

speed Internet. Along with the spread of high speed Internet access is the

development of netizenship among the Korean population. During a

recent trip to Seoul, I asked a number of different people that I met if

they are netizens. They all responded yes, or “I hope so.”

In South Korea, the overwhelming influence of the three major

newspapers on politics has led to a movement opposing this influence

known as the “anti-Chosun movement.” (Chosun Ilbo is the name of the

largest, most influential newspaper in South Korea.)

Among the developments of this movement, was the creation of an

alternative newspaper called OhmyNews by Oh Yeon Ho in February

2000. Mr. Oh had been a student activist and became a journalist for an

alternative monthly magazine. He saw, however, that the alternative

press monthly was not able to effectively challenge the influence over

politics exerted by the mainstream conservative media in South Korea.

With some funds he and a few other activist business people were able

to raise, he began the online daily newspaper OhmyNews.

Mr. Oh felt that some of the power of the conservative mainstream

media came from the fact that they were able to set the standards for

how news was produced, distributed and consumed. He was intent on

challenging that power and reshaping how and what standards were set

for the news. The goal that OhmyNews set for itself was to challenge the

great power of the mainstream news media over news production,

distribution and consumption.

He had limited financial means when he started OhmyNews so he

began with a staff of only four reporters.

1) Selection and Concentration of Articles:

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To make the most use of this small staff, he decided to focus on

carefully chosen issues. Not only would there be carefully selected

issues, but there would then be several articles on these issues so they

could have the greatest possible impact.

2) Targeting Audience:

The staff of OhmyNews decided to aim their coverage of issues

toward the young Internet generation, toward progressives and activists

and toward other reporters.

3) Challenge how standards are set and what they are:

One of the innovations made by Mr. Oh was to welcome articles not

only from the staff of the young newspaper, but also from what he called

“citizen reporters” or “citizen journalists.”

“Every citizen is a reporter,” was a motto of the young newspaper,

as they didn’t regard journalists as some exotic species. To be a reporter

was not some privilege to be reserved for the few. Rather those who had

news to share had the basis to be journalists. Referring to citizen

journalists as “news guerrillas,” OhmyNews explains that:

The dictionary definition of guerrilla is “a member of a small non-

regular armed forces who disrupt the rear positions of the enemy.”

One of the reasons for calling citizen journalists “news guerrillas”

OhmyNews explains, is that it found that citizen journalists would “post

news from perspectives uniquely their own, not those of the conservative

establishment.”

This viewpoint, the viewpoint challenging the conservative

establishment was an important insight that OhmyNews had about the

kinds of submissions it was interested in for its newspaper, submissions

from those who were not part of their staff but whose writing became a

significant contribution to OhmyNews.

Articles submitted by citizen journalists would be fact checked,

edited, and if they were used in OhmyNews, a small fee would be paid

for them.

Articles could include the views of their authors as long as the facts

were accurate. In this way OhmyNews was changing both who were

considered as journalists able to produce the news, and what form

articles would take.

Basing itself mainly on the Internet to distribute the news,

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OhmyNews was also changing the form of news distribution.

(Once a week a print edition was produced from among the articles

that appeared in the online edition during the week. There was a need to

produce a print edition in order to be considered a newspaper under the

South Korean newspaper law.)

The long term strategy of OhmyNews was to create a daily Internet

based newspaper superior to the most powerful South Korean newspaper

at the time (the digital version of Chosun Ilbo, the Digital Chosun)

In its short seven year existence there have been a number of

instances when OhmyNews succeeded in having an important impact on

politics in South Korea. A few such instances are:

1) Helping to build what became large candlelight demonstrations

against the agreement governing the relations between the U.S.

government and South Korea. This agreement is known as the Status of

Forces Agreement. (The U.S. has approximately 30,000 troops in South

Korea.)

2) Helping to build the campaign for the presidency of South Korea for

a political outsider Roh Moo-hyun in Nov-Dec 2002.

3) Helping to bring to public attention the death of a draftee from

stomach cancer because of poor medical treatment in the military.

Articles in OMN helped to expose the problem and put pressure on the

South Korean government to change the conditions.

4) Helping to create a climate favorable to the development of online

publications.

IV Telepolis – the Online Magazine

In Germany a different form of online journalism has developed.

One influential example is Telepolis, an online magazine created in

March 1996 to focus on Internet culture. The online magazine is part of

the Heise publication network. Telepolis which celebrated its 10

anniversary in 2006, has a small staff and also accepts articles from

freelancers for which it pays a modest fee. It publishes several new

articles every day on its web site and also has an area where there is

often lively online discussion about the articles which have appeared.

The articles are mainly in German though some English articles are pub-

lished as well.

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Describing Telepolis in 1997, David Hudson writes:

“Over eight hundred articles are up (online), many of them in

English, and people are reading them. The number of pageviews is

rumored to rival that of some sites put up by well-established maga-

zines. So…Telepolis has actually done quite a service for some of

the more out of the way ideas that might not otherwise have become

a part of European digital culture.” (Rewired, http://www.rewired.com/97/1010.html)

One example of what I consider Telepolis’s important achievements

is the fact that the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World

Trade Center, a series of articles began in Telepolis questioning how

quickly the U.S. government claimed it knew the source of the attacks,

despite the fact that no preparations had been made to prevent the

attacks. A lively discussion ensued in response to the articles on

Telepolis. Serious questions were raised comparing what happened on

Sept. 11 and the ensuing attacks by the U.S. government on civil

liberties using Sept. 11 as a pretext. Comparisons were considered and

debated comparing Sept. 11 and the response of the U.S. government

with what happened in Germany with the Reistag fire and the rise of

fascism in the 1930s. Describing the response he received to his articles

in Telepolis, the journalist Mathias Broeckers writes:

“Never before in my 20 years as a journalist and author of more than

500 newspaper and radio pieces have I had a greater response than

to the articles on the World Trade Center series although they were

only published on the Internet. Although? I reckon it’s rather

because they were only to be found in the Internet magazine

Telepolis, and soon after on thousands of Web sites and forums

everywhere on the Internet, that they achieved this level of response

and credibility.” (Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories and the Secrets

of 9/11, Progress Press, June 2006)

Similarly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I wrote an article for

Telepolis about the large demonstration held in New York City on

Saturday, February 15, 2003. In the article I proposed that the demon-

stration would have been even larger but for a number of obstacles the

U.S. government put in the path of those wanting to protest the U.S.

invading Iraq. A significant discussion among the readers of Telepolis

followed in which the issues raised in the article were carefully

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examined and other sources used to fact check the article and to compare

the view I presented with that which appeared in the more mainstream

press.

V- Blogs in the U.S.

There is no U.S. online publication equivalent to OhmyNews in

South Korea or Telepolis in Germany. There are a number of blogs,

which often challenge the reporting of the mainstream media in the U.S.

or which respond, often critically, to U.S. government policy and

actions.

One blog I have found particularly interesting is the blog “China

Matters.”

The author of the blog is anonymous, using the name “China Hand.”

He introduces his blog by explaining that U.S. policy on China is very

important, yet there is relatively little information presented about China

to the public in the U.S.

China Hand writes: “America’s China policy evolves with relatively

little public information, insight or debate. In the Internet age, that’s not

desirable or justifiable. So China Matters. The purpose of this website

is to provide objective, authoritative information and to comment on

matters concerning the People’s Republic of China.”

An important role the China Matters blog played recently was to

help provide information about the U.S. Treasury Department’s actions

to freeze North Korean funds in a bank in Macau, China, the Banco

Delta Asia (BDA) bank.

To fill in some background, in September 2005, an agreement was

reached to serve as a foundation for negotiations among the six countries

negotiating a peace agreement for the Korean Peninsula. Shortly

afterwards, the U.S. government announced that it had taken an action

under the U.S. Patriot Act to freeze $25 million of North Korean funds

held in a bank in Macau, China. This action stalled any continuation of

the negotiations until the money would be released and returned to North

Korea via the banking system.

The China Matters blog posted documents from the owner of the

bank in China demonstrating that no proof had been presented to justify

the U.S. government’s actions. The publication of these documents

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made it possible for of the publications to carry articles so that a

spotlight was focused on the problem. The problem was then able to be

resolved. The money was released to North Korea, paving the way for

the resumption of the Six-Party Talks.

VI – Netizen journalism in China

China, like the U.S. doesn’t appear to have an online newspaper or

magazine like OhmyNews or like Telepolis. There are, however, a

number of active online forums and blogs.

Perhaps one of the most well known recent activities of Chinese

bloggers is known as “the Most Awesome Nail House” saga.

A nail house, according to an article in OhmyNews International is

the name given by real estate developers to describe the building of an

owner who opposes moving even when his property is slated for

demolition.

This past February, a blogger posted a photograph of one such

building on the Internet. The picture spread around the Internet. The

building was owned by Yang Wu and his wife Wu Ping. It was the

building where they had lived and had a small restaurant. The nail house

was located on number 17 Hexing Road, Yangjiaping, Changqing,

Real estate developers planned to build a shopping center on that

spot and had successfully acquired all the surrounding buildings. Yang

Wu and his wife, however, were determined to resist until their demand

for what they felt was fair compensation was met.

In September 2004, demolition of the surrounding buildings began

and by February 2007 only Yang’s building remained. The developers

cut off the water and electricity even though this was illegal.

The story spread not only over the blogs but soon also in the Chinese

media. At one point, however, the story was not being reported in the

Chinese press. A blogger from Hunan, Zola Zhou wrote on his blog, “I

realize this is a one-time chance and so from far far away I came to

Changqing to conduct a thorough investigation in an attempt to

understand a variety of viewpoints.”

On his blog, Zola reports that he took a train and arrived two days

later at the Changqing train station. On his way to the nail house, he

stopped to have rice noodles, and asked the shop owner what he thought

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of the nail house saga. Along the way he spoke to other people he met.

He reported on the variety of views of the people he met on his blog.

Some of those he spoke with supported Yang Wu and Wu Ping. Others

felt Yang Wu and Wu Ping were asking for a lot of money. (20 million

RMB) and that the developer was justified in refusing to pay such an

outlandish amount. Another person told Zola that Yang Wu was only

asking for the ability to be relocated to a comparable place and that the

developer was offering too little for the property.

After arriving in Changqing, Zola reports on his blog that he bought

the newspapers and looked to see if there was any news that day about

the Nail House saga. He reports he didn’t find any coverage, though he

was told there may have been some in the paper from the previous day.

One of the surprises for Zola in Changqing was to find that other

people who were losing their homes and businesses had gathered around

the Nail House hoping to find reporters to cover their struggles against

developers.

One such person offered Zola some money to help with the young

blogger’s expenses. “I’d never come across a situation like this before,”

he writes, “and never thought to take money from people I’d help by

writing about, so I firmly said I didn’t want it, saying I only came to help

him out of a sense of justice and that it might not necessarily prove

successful.” Zola explains that he wondered if accepting the money

“would lead me to stray further and further from my emerging sense of

justice.” Eventually, he let the person buy him lunch and later, he

accepted money to be able to stay in a hotel room for a few days to

continue to cover the story on his blog. Also Zola eventually asked Yang

Wu’s wife Wu Ping what her demand of the developer is. Her answer,

he writes, is “I don’t want money. What I want is a place of the same

size anywhere in this area.”

Zola had heard a rumor that Wu Ping could hold out for her demands

to be met by the developers because her father was a delegate for the

National People’s Congress.

Zola asked Wu Ping if her father is a delegate for the National

People’s Congress. Wu Ping responded, “No” her father wasn’t a

delegate. She had had some background, however, reading law books

and had had the experience of going through a law suit which she won.

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But Wu Ping did not want a law suit against the developer because she

said that “A lawsuit goes on for three to five years. I may win the law

suit but I end up losing money.”

In April, the Awesome Nail House was demolished.

In preparing my talk for today, I sent Zola e-mail asking a few

questions. I asked him what the outcome was of the Nail House struggle.

He said that Yang Wu and Wu Ping were given another house and

900,000 RMB for what they lost during the time they couldn’t operate

their restaurant.

I also asked him, “Do you consider yourself a netizen? Can you say

why?” He answered, “Yes, I do. Because I read news from Internet,

Make friends from Internet, communicate with friends by Internet, write

a blog at the Internet.”

Another example of netizen activity on the Net in China is the story

that Xin Yahua posted about young people in the provinces of Shanxi

and Henan being kidnapped and then subjected to slave labor working

conditions. Families reported the disappearance of young people in the

vicinity of the Zhengzhou Railway Station, bus stations, or nearby roads.

A discovery was made that a number of young people had been abducted

and then sold for 500 yuan (about $62) to be used as slave labor for

illegal brick kilns operating in Shanxi.

On the evening of June 5, 2007, a post appeared on the online forum

at “Dahe Net,” which attracted much attention and many page views.

The post appeared as an open letter from 400 fathers of abducted

children. The letter described how when the fathers went to the local

government to ask for help they were turned away, with the excuse

given that the kilns where the slave labor conditions were being

practiced, were in a different police jurisdiction from where the

abductions had taken place. “Henan and Shanxi police pass the buck

back and forth,” the letter explained. “Who can rescue them,” the letter

asked. “With the governments of Henan and Shanxi passing the buck to

each other, whom should we ask for help? This is extremely urgent and

concerns the life and death of our children. Who can help us?”

Xin Yanhua, a 32 year old woman who was the aunt of one of the

abducted young people, wrote the letter. She originally posted it under

an anonymous name (“Central Plain Old Pi”). Her nephew had been

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abducted, but then rescued and returned home by some of the fathers

looking for their own children. She was grateful to those who found her

nephew and wanted to find a way to express her gratitude. Originally she

tried to offer the fathers who found her nephew money, but they said

“This is not about the money. This is about the wretched children.” She

tried to get the local newspapers and television to cover the story. The

400 word article that appeared in the local newspaper didn’t lead to any

helpful action. The TV coverage wasn’t followed up with any further

stories. Nothing resulted from it. Xin Yanhua finally drafted the letter

from the “400 Fathers of the Missing Children” and posted it in an

Internet forum.

The forum moderator placed the post in a prominent position on the

Dahe Net forum and posted it with some of the photographs from the

Henan TV Metro Channel coverage. It was subsequently reposted on the

Tianya forum. As of June 18, the Dahe post generated more than

300,000 page views and the reposting of it at the Tianya forum had

generated more than 580,000 page views and many, many comments.

Many of the comments expressed dismay that such conditions existed

and expressed empathy for the victims and their families.

A few weeks later Xin Yanhua posted a second letter titled, “Failing

to Find their Children, 400 Parents petition again.”

The media converged from around the country to cover the story. As

a result of the posts and discussion on the Internet, state officials issued

directives and the Shanxi and Henan provincial governments initiated an

unprecedented campaign against the illegal brick kilns.

When Xin Yanhua was asked why she had done the posts, she

emphasized that she didn’t want fame or credit. The Internet had become

the only option to obtain aid for the situation. She had wanted to express

her gratitude to the parents who had rescued her nephew even though

they hadn’t been able to find their own missing children. Xin wanted to

be able obtain justice.

“This case is yet another in a growing list of cases of citizen activism

on the Chinese Internet and another sign that the government is listening

to the online chatter,” one post explained.

I hope that these examples help to show that, “Focusing too closely

on Internet censorship overlooks the expanded freedoms of expression

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made possible in China by the Internet,” as one Chinese computer

researcher has commented.

Conclusion

The few examples I have had the time to present are just the tip of

an ice berg, to indicate that already the Net and Netizens are having an

impact on our society. The impact on the role the press and media play

may have different expressions in different countries, as my examples

demonstrate with respect to South Korea, Germany, the U.S. and China.

But in all these instances the Net and Netizens are having an impact not

only on the role of the media on society, but on government activity and

on the very nature of the press itself.

I want to draw your attention to a cartoon:

(

http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/cartoon.ppt). In the cartoon there are several scientists

(paleontologists) who have come to look for something they have been

told is very large. They are discussing whether they should turn back as

they don’t see anything. But if you look carefully at the cartoon, you can

see that they are standing in the midst of a huge footprint. The problem

is that it is so large that they can’t see it.

I want to propose that like the cartoon the Internet and Netizens are

having an impact on our society, which can be difficult to see but yet

may be very large. I want to propose that we don’t make the mistake of

turning back because we can’t see it.

*The student referred to is Michael Hauben. He is co-author of the book

Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet.

(

http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/)

Page 43

Conference Presentation

Videos Online

The “Across the Great Wall” twentieth anniversary celebration was

sponsored and hosted by the Hasso Plattner Institute. The program and

biographical information about the participants can be seen at:

http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/fileadmin/hpi/ veranstaltungen/china/slides/conference_binder.pdf.

The Institute has archived online video files of the presentations. Some

of those presentations can be viewed at: “Introduction to the Forum” (in

German and Chinese, no English translation)

http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3201.html

“Connecting China to the International Computer Networks” Werner

Zorn http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3202.html

“Growth of the Internet in China since 1987” Hu Qiheng

http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3203.html

“Panel discussion: The Impact of the first e-mail” chaired by Dennis

Jennings http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3204.html

“Brief Introduction to CNNIC and IDN in China” Zhang Jianchuan

http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3233.html

“The Netizen Movement and Its Impact” Ronda Hauben

http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3234.html

“Building the global Metaverse” Ailin Guntram Graef

http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3235.html

“W3C und W3C World Offices” Klaus Birkenbihl

http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3236.html

“Supported Vocational Education Instructors Training for China at

Tongji University Shanghai” Thorsten Giertz

http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3237.html

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“Internet and the freedom of opinion” Wolfgang Kleinwächter

http://www.tele-task.de/page50_lecture3238.html

Most of these presentations are referred to already in this issue. The

presentation by Zhang Jianchuan outlines some of the history and

current state of the Internet in China and discusses the effort to have

Chinese character internet addressing available with its advantage for

Chinese speaking people. The slides for his presentation are at:

h t t p : / / w w w . h p i . u n i - p o t s d a m . d e / f i l e a d m i n / h p i / v e r a n s t a l t u n g e n / c h i n a / s l i d e s / -

070919_S3b_1_ZHANG_CNNIC.pdf.

The presentation by Wolfgang Kleinwächter discusses the questions

of freedom of opinion and of censorship. As it applies to China, he

stressed that the advances of free expression are the main aspect not as

is often erroneously cited, censorship. The slides for his presentation are

at:

http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/fileadmin/hpi/veranstaltungen/china/slides/070919_S3b_6_Klein-

waechter_Internet_Freedom_of_Opinion.pdf

[Editor’s note: The following article attempts to put the collaboration

which led to the first e-mail massage from China to the world over the

CSNet in the context of international computer and networking

cooperation. http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/context.ppt ]

Some Context for the Spread of Csnet

to the Peoples Republic of China

by Jay Hauben

This article puts the spread of CSNET e-mail to the Peoples

Republic of China into a particular historical context.

A clue to that context is where the first e-mail message went when

it left Beijing. The Cc: line on the September 20, 1987 e-mail message

tells us that the message not only went from Beijing to Karlsruhe, from

the Peoples Republic of China to the Federal Republic of Germany. It

Page 45

went also to lhl, Larry Landweber at the University of Wisconsin and to

Dave Farber at the University of Delaware both in the U.S. using the

CSNET and to Dennis Jennings in Dublin Ireland using CSNET and

BITNET. And it went to the CSNET Coordination and Information

Center, CIC.

The message on this China-Germany link went across a supposed

ideological and many geographic and technical borders. What Professors

Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and their teams had done was spread

the international computer science e-mail network CSNET to the

People’s Republic of China. They had taken a step toward an internet

connection between the people of China and the online people of the rest

of the world.

As an historian and a journalist I want to go back in time and trace

a tradition of sharing and crossing borders that is a characteristic of com-

puter development and computer science. I will start with the

Hungarian-born scientist and mathematician John von Neumann just

after the Second World War.

Von Neumann had set a very solid scientific foundation for

computer development in his work for the U.S. government during the

war. He foresaw that it would not be possible to know how computers

would be used and so the most general purpose computer should be

built.

He wrote a report presenting detailed arguments for the axiomatic

features that have characterized computers ever since. But when the war

ended there began to be a battle over who would get the patent for the

basic ideas that were embodied in the ENIAC, one of the first successful

electronic digital computers. Von Neumann saw a potential conflict

between scientific and commercial development of computers.

Von Neumann argued that the foundation of computing should be

scientific and that a prototype computer be built at the Institute for Ad-

vanced Study at Princeton, NJ to insure that a general purpose computer

be build by scientists. He wrote: “It is…, very important to be able to

plan such a machine without any inhibitions and to run it quite freely

and governed by scientific considerations.” The computer became

known as the Institute for Advanced Studies or IAS computer.

Von Neumann also set the pattern in the very beginning that the

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fundamental principles of computing should not be patented but should

be put in the public domain. He wrote:

“…[W]e are hardly interested in exclusive patents but rather in seeing

that anything that we contributed to the subject, directly or indirectly,

remains accessible to the general public…[O]ur main interest is to see

that the government and the scientific public have full rights to the free

use of any information connected with this subject.”

He was here placing his contributions to computer development into

the long tradition of the public nature of science, the norm of sharing

scientific results. That norm had been interrupted by the war.

Von Neumann gathered a team of scientists and engineers at the

Institute for Advanced Studies to design and construct the IAS com-

puter. He and his team documented their theoretical reasoning and

logical and design features in a series of reports. They submitted the

reports to the U.S. Patent Office and the U.S. Library of Congress with

affidavits requesting that the material be put in the public domain. And,

they sent out these reports – 175 copies of them by land and sea mail –

to scientist and engineer colleagues in the U.S. and around the world.

The reports included full details how the computer was to be constructed

and how to code the solution to problems.

Aided by the IAS reports, computers were designed and constructed

at many institutions in the U.S., and in Russia, Sweden, Germany, Israel,

Denmark, and Australia. Also, scientific and technical journals began to

contain articles describing computer developments in many of these

countries. Visits were exchanged so the researchers could learn from

each other’s projects. This open collaborative process in the late 1940s

laid a solid foundation for computer development. It was upon that

scientific foundation that commercial interests were able to begin their

computer projects starting by the early 1950s.

The end of the war had unleashed a general interest in the scientific

and engineering communities for computer development. Many

researchers had to be patient while their counties recovered from the

devastation of the war before they could fully participate. Still computer

development was international from its early days.

Scientific and technical computer advances continued in the 1950s.

A new field of study and practice was emerging, Information Process-

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ing, what is called today Informatics or Computer Science.

Starting in 1951, in the United States national biennial Joint

Computer Conferences (JCC) were held for American and Canadian

researchers from the three professional associations active in computer

development.

What may have been the first major international electronic digital

computer conferences was organized in 1955 by Alwin Walther, a Ger-

man mathematician. It was in Darmstadt, Germany. There were 560

attendees. One of the sixty speakers at the meeting was Herman

Goldstine, von Neumann’s partner in the IAS Computer Project and one

of the signatories of the affidavit putting all his work into the public

domain. The abstracts were all published in both German and English.

This conference and others held during the time of the division of

Germany were partly the result of efforts by German scientists on both

sides of the divide to keep in touch with each other’s work.

In China also computer development was on the agenda. In 1956, the

Twelve-Year Plan for the Development of Sciences and Technology

included computer technology as one of the 57 priority fields.

Describing the mid 1950s, Isaac Auerbach, an American engineer

active organizing the Joint conferences, reports that “In those days we

were constantly talking about the state of the art of computers…. I

suggested then that an international meeting at which computer scientists

and engineers from many nations of the world might exchange informa-

tion about the state of the computer art would be interesting and

potentially valuable. I expressed the hope that we could benefit from

knowledge of what was happening in other parts of the world…. The

idea was strongly endorsed….” Auerbach projected such a conference

would be a “major contribution to a more stable world.” This line of

thought helped suggest approaching UNESCO, the United Nations

Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to sponsor such a

conference.

UNESCO was receiving proposals from other countries as well. The

result was the first World Computer Conference, held in 1959 in Paris.

Nearly 1800 participants from 38 countries and 13 international

organizations attended. Auerbach wrote that “by far, the most important

success of the conference was the co-mingling of people from all parts

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of the world, their making new acquaintances, and their willingness to

share their knowledge with one another.” Computers and computing

knowledge was treated at this conference as an international public

good. The level of development reported from around the world was

uneven but sharing was in all directions.

During the UNESCO conference, many attendees expressed an

interest in the holding of such meetings regularly. A charter was pro-

posed and by Jan 1960 the International Federation for Information

Processing (IFIP) was founded. IFIP’s mission was to be an “apolitical

world organization to encourage and assist in the development,

exploitation and application of Information Technology for the benefit

of all people.” Eventually, IFIP subgroups sponsored annually hundreds

of international conferences on the science, education, impact of

computers and information processing.

The success of the IFIP in fulfilling its mission is attested to by the

fact that all during the Cold War, IFIP conferences helped researchers

from East and West to meet together as equals to report about their

computing research and eventually about their computer networking

research and activities. [As an aside, when the IFIP held its Sixteenth

World Computer Conference in the year 2000 it was in Beijing.]

The sharing among researchers by letter and at conferences was also

being built directly into the computer technology itself. The 1960s, were

ushered in by the beginning of development of the time-sharing mode

of computer operations. Before time-sharing, computers were used

mostly in batch processing mode where users left jobs at the computer

center and later received back the results. Computer time-sharing

technology made possible the simultaneous use of a single computer by

many users. In this way more people could be using computers and each

user could interact with the computer directly.

The human-computer interactivity made possible by time-sharing

suggested to J. C. R. Licklider, an American psychologist and visionary,

the possibility of human-computer thinking centers. A computer and the

people using it forming a collaborative work team. He then envisioned

the interconnection of these centers into what he called in the early

1960s the “intergalactic network,” all people at terminals everywhere

connected via a computer communications system. Licklider also

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foresaw that all human knowledge would be digitized and somehow

made available via computer networks for all possible human uses. This

was Licklider’s vision for an internet.

In 1962, Licklider was offered the opportunity to start the Informa-

tion Processing Techniques Office a civilian office within the U.S.

Defense Department. As its director he gave leadership insuring the

development and spread of time-sharing interactive computing which

gave raise to a community of time-sharing researchers across the U.S.

Computer time-sharing on separate computers led to the idea of

connecting such computers and even how to connect them.

Donald Davies, a British computer scientist, visited the time-sharing

research sites that Licklider supported in the U.S. Later he invited time-

sharing researchers to give a workshop at his institution. Davies reports

that after the workshop he realized that the principle of sharing could be

applied to data communication. He conceived of a new technology

which he called packet switching. The communication lines could be

shared by many users if the messages were broken up into packets and

the packets interspersed. Davies’ new technology treated each message

and each packet equally. By sharing the communication system in this

way a major efficiency was achieved over telephone technology.

By 1968 Licklider foresaw that packet switching networking among

geographically separated people would lead to many communities based

on common interest rather than restricted to common location. Licklider

expected that network technology would facilitate sharing across borders.

Licklider and his co-author Robert Taylor also realized that there

would be political and social questions to be solved. They raised the

question of access, of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’ They wrote:

“For the society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly

on the question: Will ‘to be on line’ be a privilege or a right? If only

a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the

advantage of ‘intelligence amplification,’ the network may exagger-

ate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity.”

Licklider and Taylor were predicting that the technology would have

built into it the capacity to connect everyone but spreading the connec-

tivity would encounter many obstacles.

Von Neumann’s putting his computer code in the public domain was

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repeated. In 1969, mathematicians at the U.S. telephone company AT&T

Bell Labs started to build a computer time-sharing operating system for

their own use. They called it UNIX. It was simple and powerful. AT&T

was forbidden to sell it because computer software was not part of its

core business. The developers made UNIX available on tapes for the

cost of the tapes. They also made the entire software code available as

well. Being inexpensive and powerful and open for change and

improvement by its users, UNIX spread around the world. UNIX user

organizations united these people into self-help communities.

The computer time-sharing scientists that Licklider supported also

began in 1969 an experiment to connect their time-sharing centers across

the U.S. Their project resulted in the first large scale network of

dissimilar computers. Its success was based on packet switching

technology. That network became known as the ARPAnet, named after

the parent agency that sponsored the project, the Advanced Research

Project Agency (ARPA). The ARPAnet was a scientific experiment

among academic researchers not as is often stated a military project.

The goal of the ARPAnet project was “to facilitate resource

sharing.” The biggest surprise was that the ARPAnet was used mostly

for the exchange of text messages among the researchers about their

common work or unrelated to work. Such message exchanges occurred

in every time sharing community. The ARPAnet only increased the

range and number of users who could be reached. Thus was born e-mail,

an effective and convenient added means of human communication. The

idea of swapping messages is simple. Communication technologies that

make an e-mail system possible is the challenge.

The ARPAnet started with four nodes in early 1970 and grew

monthly. Early technical work on it was reported at the joint conferences

in the U.S. and in the open technical literature. Similar packet switching

experiments took place elsewhere especially France and the U.K. Visits

were exchanged and each other’s literature was eagerly read.

The thought of interconnecting these networks seemed a natural next

step. Again the technology itself invited sharing and connecting, all of

which requires collaboration.

The spark toward what we know today as the internet emerged

seriously in October 1972 at the first International Computer Communi-

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cations Conference in Washington D.C. Not well known is the fact that

the internet was international from its very beginning. At this conference

researchers from projects around the world discussed the need to begin

work establishing agreed upon protocols. The International Working

Group (INWG) was created which helped foster the exchange of ideas

and lessons. Consistent with IFIP purposes this group became IFIP

Working Group 6.1.

The problem to be solved was how to provide computer communica-

tion among technically different computer networks in countries with

different political systems and laws. From the very beginning the

solution had to be sought via an international collaboration. The

collaboration that made possible the TCP/IP foundation of the internet

was by U.S., Norwegian and U.K. researchers.

Throughout the 1970s the ARPAnet grew as did computing and

computer centers in many countries. Schemes were proposed to connect

national computer centers across geographic boundaries. In Europe, a

European Informatics Network was proposed for Western Europe. A

similar networked called IIASANET was proposed for Eastern Europe.

The hope was to connect the two computer networks with Vienna as the

East-West connection point. IIASANET got its name from the Interna-

tional Institute for Advanced System Analysis which was an East-West

institute for joint scientific work. When the researchers met for joint

work in the IIASA Computer Project or at IFIP conferences, they were

pointed to or had already read the journal articles describing the details

of the ARPAnet. The literature had crossed the Iron Curtain and now the

researchers tried to get networks to cross too. At this they failed. The

reason seemed both commercial and political. The networks depended

on telephone lines and the telephone companies were reluctant to

welcome new technology. Also, with the coming of Ronald Reagan to

the U.S. Presidency, hard line politics derailed East-West cooperative

projects.

Efforts in the 1970s to exchange visits among computer scientists

also included China. In 1972 six substantial U.S. computer scientists on

their own initiative were able to arrange a three week visit to tour

computer facilities and discuss computer science in Shanghai and

Beijing. They reported that the Chinese computer scientists they met

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were experienced and well read in western technical literature. The

discussions and sharing were at a high level. They felt their trip was a

useful beginning to reestablish “channels of communication between

Chinese and American computer scientists.” A few months after their

visit, a tour of seven Chinese scientists of the U.S. included Li Fu-sheng

a computer scientist.

In the U.S., the advantage of being on the ARPAnet especially e-

mail and file transfer attracted the attention of computer scientists and

their graduate students. But most universities could not afford the

estimated $100,000 annual cost nor had the influence to get connected.

A common feeling was that those not on the ARPAnet missed out on the

collaboration it made possible.

To remedy the situation two graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim

Ellis developed a way to use the copy function built into the Unix

operating system to pass messages on from computer to computer over

telephone lines. The messages could be commented on and the com-

ments would then be passed on with the messages. In that way the

messages became a discussion. They called the system USENET short

for UNIX Users Network. Since UNIX was wide spread on computers

in many countries, USENET spread around the world. Based at first on

telephone connections between computers the costs could be substantial.

Some help with phone costs was given by AT&T the regulated U.S.

phone company. Computer tapes containing a set of messages were

sometimes mailed or carried between say the U.S. and Europe or

Australia as a less expensive means of sharing the discussions.

At the same time, Larry Landweber, a computer scientist in the U.S.,

gathered other computer scientists who lacked ARPAnet connectivity.

The ARPAnet connected universities were pulling ahead of the others

in terms of research collaboration and contribution. Landweber and his

colleagues made a proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation

(NSF) for funding for a research computer network for the entire

computer science community.

At first the NSF turned the proposal down. There were favorable

reviews, but some reviewers thought the project would have too many

problems for the proposers to solve and that they lacked sufficient

networking experience. Although disappointed, Landweber and his

Page 53

colleagues continued to work to put together an acceptable proposal.

They received help from many researchers in the computer science

community By 1981 they had support for their Computer Science

Research Network (CSNET) project which would allow for connection

with the ARPAnet, telephone dial-up connections and what was called

public data transmission over telephone lines.

Landweber’s group got funding and management help from the NSF.

Piece by piece they solved the problems. A gateway was established

between CSNET and the ARPAnet and CSNET spread throughout the U.S.

But it didn’t stop there. Landweber and his co-workers supported

researchers in Israel soon followed by Korea, Australia, Canada, France,

Germany, and Japan to join at least the CSNET e-mail system. Also,

CSNET was a critical driver in helping the NSF see the importance of

funding an NSFNET and thus, contributed to the transition to the

modern Internet.

In 1984, computer scientists at Karlsruhe University notably Michael

Rotert and Werner Zorn succeeded in setting up a node for Germany to

be on the CSNET system. These scientists wanted to spread this

connectivity. It was via that node that they conceived of the possibility

that computer scientists in China could have e-mail connectivity with the

rest of the international computer science community. The rest is the

history we are celebrating!

To sum up, there is a solid tradition associated with computers and

computer networks. The technology and the people involved tend to

support sharing and spreading of the advantages computing and

networks bring. Part of that tradition is:

Von Neumann insisting that the foundation of computing be

scientific and in the public domain.

Alwin Walther and Isaac Auerbach insuring that computer science

was shared at international conferences.

J. C. R. Licklider envisioning an intergalactic network.

Donald Davies conceiving of packet switching communication line

sharing technology.

Louis Pouzin and Bob Kahn initiating internetworking projects.

Tom Truscott initiating Usenet.

Larry Landweber persisting to get all computer scientists onto at

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least e-mail.

And Werner Zorn and Yufeng Wang insuring that Chinese computer

scientists were included.

I feel we today are celebrating and supporting that long tradition.

[Editor’s note: The following interview was conducted on Sept 23, 2007

in Berlin for the book, Wem gehört das Internet? Gabrielle Hoofacker

is the founder of the Munich Media-Store and Journalists-Academy.]

Netizen Journalism: An Interview,

Berlin Sept 23, 2007

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: Would you say that netizen journalism is the

same as grassroots journalism?

Ronda Hauben: They are not quite the same. Netizen journalism

includes grassroots journalism, but the significance I understand is that

a netizen has a social perspective and does something from that

perspective. Some of the origin of the term netizen was when Michael

Hauben, then a college, student did some research in 1992-1993. He sent

out a number of questions on Usenet which was at the time and still is

an online forum for discussion. Usenet was very active in the early 90s.

He also sent his questions out on internet mailing lists.

In the responses to his questions people said that they were inter-

ested in the internet for the different things they were trying to do but

they also wanted to figure out how to spread the internet, to help it to

grow and thrive and to help everybody have access. What Michael found

was that there was a social purpose that people explained to him. People

had developed this social sense from the fact that they could participate

online and find some very interesting valuable possibilities online. Many

of the people that responded to his questions shared with him that they

wanted to contribute to the internet so that it would grow and thrive.

In my opinion this set of characteristics is broader than grassroots

journalism. Grassroots journalism I would interpret as people from the

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grassroots having the ability to post. But where there is also a social

desire and purpose, that is what I would define as netizen journalism.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: You also said political participation?

Ronda Hauben: Yes a political and a social purpose. By social I mean

that people support something happening for other people, that the net

be shared and be available to a broader set of people.

This includes a political focus as well.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: I just remember one of my first keynote

speeches. I had to speak about empowering the information poor in

1994. It was a meeting of pedagogic teachers and I told them that they

should try to make it possible for many people of all classes to have

access to the internet. That I think is some of the sense of being a

netizen.

Ronda Hauben: That is being a netizen.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: I’m afraid many people think participation

only means economical and not political and that especially people in

Eastern Europe mainly wanted to take part economically.

Ronda Hauben: In the U.S. for example there has been a lot of pressure

supported by the U.S. government for seeing the internet as a way to

enrich yourself. But that is not what grew up with the internet commu-

nity. The pressure for the internet to be for economic purposes was in

opposition to the netizen developments in the U.S.

Jay Hauben: At one point it became clear that there was beginning to

be the internet for economic purposes in contradiction to the original

internet. That is when Ronda and Michael received a lot of help toward

having appear a print edition of their book, Netizens*. People said, we

must defend the internet from this new pressure, which is coming as an

economic pressure. That was a great impetus and support for publishing

the book.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: We just talked about the Chinese bloggers

and you told me that they call themselves netizens.

Ronda Hauben: I asked a Chinese blogger, Zola Zhou, who I had

written to if he thought of himself as a netizen. He said yes he did. Also,

I have seen articles about the internet in China that actually say that the

netizens are a small set of the Chinese online population but are those

who have political purpose and activities. That is inline with research

Page 56

that Michael originally did in the 1990s with regard to the internet and

which helped his coming to understand that such people online around

the world were netizens.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: You told me that there is a great blogger

community without censorship and also political?

Ronda Hauben: No, there is censorship in China. But there is a big

blogger community and something that I found in one of the articles that

I read I thought was very hopeful. It quoted a Chinese internet user who

said that focusing too closely on internet censorship overlooks the

expanded freedoms of expression made possible in China by the

internet. I thought that seemed correct. All I ever hear from the U.S.

press is that in China the internet is censored. Such framing of the

internet in China leads away from trying to look and understand what is

happening in China with the internet. It turns out that there is something

very significant developing and that has already developed, which

involves a lot of people who are being very active trying to discuss the

problems of China and trying to see if they can be part of helping to

solve those problems. That is the opposite of the sense you get from the

news media that talks about censorship all the time.

Jay Hauben: The chairwoman of the Internet Society of China (ISC)

Madame Hu Qiheng spoke to me about this. She said that there are some

very high Chinese government officials who have blogs and they invite

anybody and everybody to post. They answer as many posts as they can

and they are learning the importance of blogging. She feels that they will

be supportive to the changes that are needed to make the internet even

more extensive and more well spread in China. She was optimistic that

at least some in the Chinese government were seeing the importance of

the blogging activity and were learning how to be supportive of it in

some way. She wanted that to be known to the world.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: I’m not sure whether I understand. Do they

hope if the people blog they will learn to use the internet?

Jay Hauben: No, she said the government officials themselves had their

own blogs and receive from the population criticisms and complaints

and other things and they try to answer some. Those officials who have

entered into this back and forth exchange she feels will learn from it and

be supportive in the expanding support for blogging in China.

Page 57

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: There are some examples that netizens can

sometimes get control over the government. Could you give us one

example?

Ronda Hauben: A question that I have is whether netizens can have

some impact on what government does. Traditionally people like James

Mill, writing in England in the 1800s argued that if a people do not have

some oversight over government then government can only be corrupt.

That is why a society needs processes and ways that people can discuss

what government is doing and watch government. I like to use the word

‘watch dogging’ government. A piece of my research is to see if there

are ways that by having the internet and the ability to participate in the

discussion of issues netizens can have an impact on what government is

doing. I have found situations where there is an impact on government.

One example I give is a blog that is called ‘China Matters.’ Also

there have been articles in OhmyNews International, which is the

newspaper for which I write. It is the English edition of the Korean

OhmyNews an online newspaper started in 2000.

The blog China Matters was able to post some original documents

from a case involving ‘The Six-Party Talks Concerning the Korean

Peninsula.’ The six parties are North Korea, South Korea, the U.S.,

Russia, China and Japan. There was a breakthrough in the Six-Party

Talks in September of 2005 leading to a signed agreement toward

denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

Immediately after the breakthrough, the U.S. Treasury Department

announced that it was freezing the assets of a bank called Banco Delta

Asia in Macau, China. Macau is a former Portuguese colony now a part

of China as a special administrative region. Banks in Macau are under

the Chinese banking authority and supervision. The U.S. government

was determining what would happen with this bank in China. The Banco

Delta China had accounts containing $25 million of North Korean funds.

In response to the U.S. causing these funds to be frozen, North Korea

left the Six-Party Talks saying it would have nothing to do with the talks

until this matter got resolved.

In late January and the beginning of February 2007 there were

negotiations between a U.S. government official and a North Korean

official in Berlin. An agreement was reached that there would be an

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activity to work out the Banco Delta Asia problem so that the negotia-

tions could resume in the Six-Party Talks.

But often with negotiations with the U.S. whenever there is an effort

to try to straighten something out, the implementation is not done in a

way that is appropriate. In this case what was offered was that North

Korea could send someone to Macau to get the funds but it could not use

the international banking system to transfer the funds which is the

normal procedure.

U.S. Treasury Department officials went to China for negotiations

allegedly to end the financial problems the U.S. had caused for North

Korea. Officials from the different countries were waiting to have this

settled so the negotiations could go on. Instead the U.S. Treasury

Department officials failed to allow the international banking system to

be used to be able to get the funds back to North Korea.

On the China Matters blog, the blogger posted the response of the

Banco Delta Asia bank owner to these activities. If you read the owner’s

response you would realize that the bank owner was never given any

proof of any illegal activity that had gone on with regard to the funds in

his bank, so there was no justification presented for having frozen the

funds of his bank. The U.S. Treasury Department under the U.S. Patriot

Act was able to be the accuser and then the judge and jury, to make the

judgement and then have banks around the world go along.

Jay Hauben: By posting these documents on his blog, the China

Matters blogger made it possible for journalists to write about this aspect

of the case. In one of his blog posts he also put links to U.S. government

hearing documents that helped to expose the rationale and the intention

of the Treasury Department.

Ronda Hauben: Based on what I had learned from these blogs and then

subsequent research that I had been able to do using the internet to verify

what the blogger said, I wrote articles that appeared on OhmyNews

International. I was subsequently contacted by somebody from the

Korean section of the Voice of America, the official U.S. State Depart-

ment world wide broadcasting service. She asked me about the articles

I had written. Essentially the Voice of America reporter said that if this

situation went on and the funds were not returned, the Voice of America

was going to ask questions of the people I had identified who had come

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up with this policy. It would ask them to explain what they had done and

to respond to the issues raised by my articles.

Just at this time, however, a means was found to get the funds back

to North Korea via the international banking system. All the other prior

times, this had failed.

It was very interesting that this was all happening at the same time.

It provides an example of how a netizen media of blogs and online

newspapers can take up issues like this one, get under the surface to the

actual story and even have an influence on government activity.

The China Matters blog is very interesting because it says that there

is U.S. policy about China being made without the knowledge of the

American people. Therefore the American people do not understand

what is going on or what the issues are. They are not given a chance to

discuss and consider the policy. Somehow these issues have to be

opened up, they have to be more public so that there will be a good

policy with regard to what happens between the U.S. and China.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: So the way was from the netizens and the

bloggers directly to the government and not via mainstream media?

Ronda Hauben: In this situation there was one mainstream press that

was different from all the rest. It was the McClatchy newspapers.

McClatchy actually had an article about the China Matters blog. That

was helpful for people to know about the blog. Here was collaboration

between the blogger and the mainstream media but it was not that the

rest of the mainstream media picked up any of that or discussed it. Most

of the English speaking mainstream media just said that North Korea is

being very difficult and that it should be allowing the Six-Party Talks to

go on instead of making this trouble. McClatchy articles and my articles

on OhmyNews tried to understand why North Korea was insisting that

this money be returned using the international banking system. In this

situation there was no need to influence what the rest of the mainstream

media said or did. Voice of America Korea and the U.S. State Depart-

ment responded to my articles in OhmyNews directly.

Jay Hauben: In a presentation at a recent symposium, Ronda spoke of

a situation in China of child abduction and labor abuse with little re-

sponse by the local government. The situation had been casually covered

by local media butt was not solved. Only later when the story appeared

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prominently in online discussion sites did it spread. Then it was

discussed by a large cross-section of the population. Finally the gov-

ernment started to act. In this case, the government had not been

influenced by coverage by the local mainstream media but was pushed

by the coverage of the netizen media.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: Ronda, you are a featured writer for

OhmyNews. I do not know whether there is a German edition?

Ronda Hauben: No, there is none at this point. OhmyNews has a

Korean, a Japanese and an English language international edition. There

are German writers who write in English for OhmyNews International.

There is however a German online magazine which I am honored to

write for in English, Telepolis, which I would call an example of

netizens journalism.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: Why do you think that OhmyNews is a good

thing?

Ronda Hauben: The Korean edition of OhmyNews pioneered a concept

which is very interesting. The founder of OhmyNews, Mr. Oh Yeon-Ho,

had worked for an alternative monthly magazine, Mal, for almost 10

years. He saw that the mainstream media which is basically conservative

would cover a story and it would be treated as news. On the other hand,

he had uncovered for Mal a very important story about a cover-up of a

massacre during the Korean War. His story, however, got very little

coverage in the mainstream media and his coverage had no effect. About

three years later, an American reporter covered the same story and got

a Pulitzer Prize. Then the Korean mainstream media picked up the story

and gave great coverage to it.

Mr Oh realized that it was not the importance of an issue that

determined if it would be news, it was rather the importance given to the

news organization that determined that. He decided that Korea needed

to have a newspaper that could really challenge the conservative dom-

inance of the news. So he set out with a small amount of money and a

very small staff to try to influence how the press frames stories, how it

determines what should be the stories that get covered. He also decided

to welcome people to write as citizen reporters, to support the kinds of

stories that were not being told in the other newspapers. He ended up

welcoming in and opening up the newspaper so that a broader set of the

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Korean population could contribute articles to it and could help set what

the issues were covered.

One example is the story of a soldier who had been drafted into the

South Korean army. He developed stomach cancer. The medical doctors

for the army misdiagnosed his illness as ulcers and hid the evidence that

it could be cancer. He did not find out until the cancer was too far

advanced for successful treatment. He died shortly after his term in the

army was over. People who knew the soldier wrote the story and

contributed it to OhmyNews. The OhmyNews staff reporters wrote follow

up articles. There were a number of articles, which led to really looking

into what the situation was.

Jay Hauben: There were 28 articles in 10 days. The government first

said that the incident was not significant and that it happened all the

time. But as more and more articles were written and more and more

people were commenting and more and more people were writing letters

and more and more people were blaming the government, the govern-

ment changed its tune and acknowledged that there was something

seriously wrong here. The government eventually said it would put 10

billion won over a five year period to have a better medical system in the

armed services. That was the result of this 10 days of constant articles.

Everybody knew someone in the army that might get sick and they did

not want that to happen. Every mother was upset. It was a major national

phenomenon from these 28 stories in 10 days.

Ronda Hauben: That is the kind of thing that OhmyNews has done in

the Korean edition. The English language edition does not have regular

staff reporters the way the Korean edition does so is weaker in what it

can do.

A lot of the analysis of OhmyNews in the journalism literature is

only looking at the fact OhmyNews uses people as reporters who are not

part of a regular staff. This literature does not look at the whole context

of what OhmyNews has attempted and developed.

But even the practice of the English edition is worth looking at.

There, the Banco Delta-North Korean story was covered in a number of

articles. The OhmyNews staff welcomed these articles. Not only did it

welcome articles on this topic with no similar coverage elsewhere, there

was on the staff an editor who used his experience and knowledge of

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North Korea to help the journalists with their articles. He was a very

good person to have as an editor in the English language edition, to be

helpful toward covering that important aspect of the Korean story.

Unfortunately he is not an editor any longer as they had to cut back on

their editors.

Journalism articles written about OhmyNews rarely describe this

aspect of OhmyNews, that reporters need a supportive editorial staff that

is knowledgeable about the issues and willing to be really helpful to the

people doing the reporting so that they are not just off on their own but

they can have a discussion and a communication with the people who

work with the paper itself.

Jay Hauben: As a minor footnote, Ronda has some evidence that the

U.S. embassy in South Korea reads OhmyNews. She heard this from the

U.S. ambassador to South Korea and read it in a U.S. State Department

press release.

Ronda Hauben: The press release referred to one of my articles and

something that somebody else had written.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: So netizen journalism is something political?

Jay Hauben: From our point of view, yes.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: I’m asking this because some German

publishers/newspapers have another kind of amateur journalism in mind.

They think that journalists are too expensive because they must be paid

wages. So they tell their readers to send them photos, videos and texts

and say that they will publish them. The journalist union is not happy

about this.

Ronda Hauben: The dean of the Columbia University School of

Journalism in New York City wrote an article in the New Yorker

magazine where he complained about what he called ‘citizen journalism’

and referred to OhmyNews. He wrote that it was “journalism without

journalists.” When you carefully read his article, what it came down to,

was that the business form of journalism – which is basically corporate-

dominated in the U.S. and which aims to make a lot of money – has very

little regard for the nature and quality of the coverage that the newspa-

pers are allowed to do. He was basically defending the business form of

journalism in the name of defending the journalists.

He was not defending the journalists because he was not critiquing

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in any way what the journalists who work for these big corporations

must do to keep their jobs and the crisis situation that journalism is in in

the U.S. because of it.

What was interesting is that he knew about OhmyNews and he is the

dean of the Columbia Journalism School and yet he presented nothing

about the important stories that OhmyNews has covered. Instead he

referred to one particular day and he listed three stories covered by three

different journalists on this day and said this was just like the kind of

journalism you would have in a church publication or in a club newslet-

ter. It showed no effort on his part to understand or seriously consider

what OhmyNews has made possible.

I critiqued what he did in an article in OhmyNews International. I

also sent an e-mail message to him asking if he had seen a prior article

I had done in response to what a professor of the journalism school had

posted on ‘The Public Eye’ at CBS News.com. My prior article

answered the same argument the dean was now making. The ‘Public

Eye’ even gave a link to what I had written in OhmyNews.

The dean of the Columbia Journalism School answered my e-mail

acknowledging that he had seen my answer and still he made the same

argument that had been made prior rather than answering my critique of

the argument.

One of the things I pointed out in my critique was that OhmyNews

had helped make it possible for the people of South Korea in 2002 to

elect a candidate to the presidency from outside of mainstream political

community. The dean mentioned nothing about that when he trivialized

what OhmyNews has done and what the developments are. He presented

none of the actual situation and had instead a trivial discussion about the

issues. Yet he was allowed to publish his article in the New Yorker.

OhmyNews sent my response to his article to the New Yorker. The

magazine would not publish it. It was interesting that this is being

promoted as the evaluation and the understanding of netizen journalism.

It is totally inaccurate.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: I’m afraid that some professional journalism

teachers in Germany think in narrow-minded categories and only see the

professional standard of journalism and their own journalists but do not

realize what the aim of journalism is anymore – the political participa-

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tion and the control of the government.

Ronda Hauben: What I see is that netizen journalism is getting back to

the roots of why you need journalism and journalists.

In the U.S. there is a first amendment because there was an under-

standing, when it was formulated, that you have to oversee government

and that there has to be discussion and articles and a press that looks at

what government is doing and that discusses it and that that discussion

is necessary among the population. Now the internet is making this

possible. But the corporate-dominated, profit-dominated form of

journalism in the U.S. will not allow that to happen even on the internet.

Netizen journalism fortunately makes it possible.

What is of interest to me is that the Columbia Journalism School

claims that it supports ethics in journalism. Yet here is a challenge, a

challenge to treat this seriously and to learn about it, to support it, to

encourage it and to help it to spread it. Instead, its dean does the

opposite.

Jay Hauben: Let me add two points. One is that OhmyNews and

Telepolis pay their contributors. So this is not free journalism. This is a

respect for journalistic effort.

The second point is one Ronda is raising in her current research. Not

only is this new journalism getting back to the roots and the purpose of

journalism but also it is doing something new and different. Is there

something more than just being the real journalist taking over because

mainstream journalism is failing? There is an intuition that the internet

is making possible a new journalism. Perhaps the Chinese are speaking

to that when they ask, “Are we not being citizens and is it not journalism

when we communicate with each other about the news as we see it and

our understandings as we have them?”

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: Do you think that netizen journalism will

affect the mainstream journalism or that the mainstream journalism will

learn from it?

Ronda Hauben: It turned out to be very surprising to me that the

reporter from Voice of America Korea asked me some very serious and

interesting questions. I would have expected maybe left-wing journalist

to ask these questions but not a mainstream or State Department

journalist.

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Why was the Voice of America reporter asking me these questions?

Perhaps some people at the State Department realized there was serious

discussion going on online reflected by my articles but not on Voice of

America or in the mainstream media. And if there is discussion among

people about what is going on, then that leads to the mainstream media

having to learn something or become irrelevant.

Maybe that is already happening because even BBC is exploring

ways of opening up its discussions and processes. Maybe netizen

journalism has already had some impact and there is change happening

even though we do not see it yet.

Jay Hauben: Maybe also the distinction between mainstream and other

media is changing. At least in South Korea, OhmyNews is already a

mainstream media. Three years after it was created, OhmyNews was

reported to be one of the most important media in the whole society,

judged to be among the top six most influential media in South Korea.

It is not so clear that what we call the great media or the mainstream

media is left alone to have that title. The position might be changing.

The founder of OhmyNews, Mr. Oh Yeon-Ho says he would like

OhmyNews to be setting the news agenda for the Korean society. It is his

objective that OhmyNews be the main, mainstream media or at least he

says 50% of what happens in the mainstream media should be from the

progressive point of view. There should not be only the conservative

mainstream media but there should be a progressive mainstream media

as well and then those two together – that is what would serve the

society.

Ronda Hauben: Let me add that in South Korea other online progres-

sive publications have developed and online conservative publications

have developed. The media situation is much more vibrant now than it

had been, I think as a result of what Mr. Oh Yeon-Ho has achieved.

Dr. Gabriele Hoofacker: When you look into the future and imagine

what journalism and netizen journalism will be like in 10 years? What

are your expectations? What do you hope and what do you think?

Ronda Hauben: It is an interesting challenge that is being put to us.

There is a lot of support from governments and others towards making

big money off of the internet. But meanwhile for example the U.S.

society is in deep trouble because of the ability of government to do

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things without listening to the people or considering what the people’s

desires are. In my opinion netizen journalism holds out the hope and the

promise that there can be a means for the citizens and the netizens to

have more of a way of having what is done by government be something

that is a benefit to the society instead of harmful. The form this will take

is not clear. But one of the things that Michael wrote in 1992-1993 was

that the net bestows the power of the reporter on the netizens. He saw

that that was already happening then. And we see Telepolis which last

year celebrated its 10

anniversary and which unfortunately we did not

get to talk about now but which has pioneered a form of online and

netizen journalism that really is substantial and which has achieved

some very important things. There is OhmyNews in South Korea and

there are the Chinese bloggers and people posting to the forums. Even

in the U.S. some important news forums and blogs have developed.

Jay Hauben: There are also the people’s journalists in Nepal who took

up to tell the story to the world about the struggle against the king’s

dictatorial powers.

Ronda Hauben: They were able to do that because of OhmyNews

International.

I just looked at those few countries for a conference presentation I

gave recently in Potsdam. I did not look at all the other places where

things are developing. It turns out that online there is a very vibrant

environment. Something is developing and that is a great challenge to

people interested in this, to look at it seriously and try to see, firstly what

is developing and secondly, is there a way to give it support and to

figure out if there is way of beginning to have some conferences for

people to get together and have serious papers about what is happening

and some serious discussion towards the question, can we give each

other help for example to start something like OhmyNews or Telepolis

in America or similar things elsewhere. I feel that something will turn

up. It is exciting that so much is in fact going on.

*Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet, Michael Hauben and

Ronda Hauben, Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, 1997, ISBN: 978-

0-8186-7706-9.

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Edited by Jay Hauben and Ronda Hauben, December, 2007

EDITORIAL STAFF

Ronda Hauben

William Rohler

Norman O. Thompson

Michael Hauben (1973-2001)

Jay Hauben

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