August 30, 2002

Recently, the Internet Society (ISOC) appointed Fred Baker as the new chairman of its Board of Trustees. ISOC, the international focal point for global cooperation and coordination in the development of the Internet, provides global leadership in the area of Internet standards, education, and policy development issues. ISOC is the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and other Internet-related bodies.

Baker, a Cisco Fellow and key contributor to the development of the Internet, also served as the chair of the IETF from 1996 to 2001. The IETF is the international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers concerned with the protocols and operational characteristics of the Internet. Under Baker's leadership, the IETF actively encouraged non-North American involvement and reached out to more traditional standards bodies and forums to foster global acceptance of Internet technology.

At Cisco, Baker's primary interest areas include the improvement of Quality of Service (QoS) for best effort and real time traffic, the development of routing and addressing, and issues in law enforcement and emergency use of the Internet. He also serves on the IAB and chairs the Internet Emergency Preparedness Working Group.

News@Cisco spoke with Baker about his ISOC appointment, the role of ISOC, and plans for bringing the Internet to all points on the globe.

What is the role of ISOC in the Internet today and the impact on users?
Fred Baker: ISOC is a professional society intended to promote the Internet user -- and the responsible use of the Internet throughout the world. It has three roles, which it uses internally to organize itself, and calls "pillars." These pillars include its formal relationship with the IETF, for which it supplies corporate support, its role in education and training, and its role in public policy development.

The IETF, as you know, is a loose association of technical professionals who develop the protocols used in the Internet. Due to the way it is organized, it has no real corporate structure. The Internet Society provides a corporate context that can sign MOUs and contracts, purchase insurance, and speak with these outside bodies.

The education and training angle consists of two large annual conferences plus a smattering of smaller regional workshops. Much of the education and training is done by its 72 chapters, which are local entities. While ISOC is hardly the only body doing such training, it has historically been important to the development of Internet understanding and deployment in developing countries. Cisco has historically worked closely with and through ISOC in these workshops -- it has been good for Cisco as well.

From a public policy perspective, the IETF confines its comments to engineering matters, such as statements that comment on what is good for the infrastructure, and how public policy interacts with the infrastructure. For example, the IETF has issued statements that address privacy and wiretap issues from the infrastructure perspective. On public policy issues that affect users more than the infrastructure, ISOC has taken on the role of analyzing and commenting on these matters.

In your assignment as chair of the Board of Trustees of ISOC, what are your responsibilities and areas of focus?
Fred Baker: As the chairman of the board, my first responsibility is a fiduciary one -- to operate ISOC as a business, to make sure that the CEO Lynn St. Amour has proper funding, and policies are in place to ensure funding is spent appropriately. Given that, there are others -- officers of the corporation and their staff, chapter membership, and so on -- who actually oversee the business.

What are your immediate priorities in this new role?
Fred Baker: My first priority is setting an appropriate direction for the Internet Society. The Internet has changed, and developing countries have been fairly successful in deploying the technology. It is time for ISOC to declare victory with respect to that, and move into a new phase. The new challenges are educational -- given access, what can developing countries do with it? How can we close the technology gap, and address specific needs that developing countries have? One of my first goals is to set a five to ten year strategy for ISOC to address emerging issues. The funding model is a perennial issue that I also plan to address.

What do you see are the major challenges for the growth of the Internet?
Fred Baker: Right now, the Internet "speaks" English. We have done work to enable Internet protocols to support other languages, but the naming conventions remain solidly limited to the English alphabet. More expansion of the Internet to include non-English languages is fundamental for the Internet to gain in use and utility in countries that use Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic, and other character sets.

Security is also an issue, whether it is theft of service due to spam, viruses and worms, or outright attacks. The Klez virus specifically sends email as if from me, meaning that people who filter out spam by filtering on source will not hear me if I choose to speak to them. There are significant issues here. And regulatory issues, such as the CyberCrime Treaty, are being raised in a number of countries.

How do you see ISOC shaping the future of a global, secure Internet?
Fred Baker: Largely through education and commentary on policy -- helping people identify and understand what is good and bad for the Internet so we can all use the Internet more effectively and control it more rationally.

Personally, I'm very interested in working with third world countries to give them access to the Internet -- not for their interest in technology but to use the Internet to help solve their basic health and survival needs. The Internet could provide the information necessary for agricultural development, to help eradicate the bugs that destroy crops, and so on.