Zoning the Internet
Sandy Brooks (sbrooks@ecl.org)
Wed, 10 Dec 1997 12:05:33 -0500
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 12:05:33 -0500
Message-Id: <348E7F90.6210@ecl.org>
From: Sandy Brooks <sbrooks@ecl.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <conntech>
Subject: Zoning the Internet
I'd like to share an idea I had and maybe generate some discussion. It probably won't
work, but discussing might bring up other ideas. Here goes:
How about "zoning" the Internet, sort of like land is zoned commercial, residential, etc.?
A server could be "zoned" as maybe educational, recreational, medical, sexually explicit,
whatever. There would have to be some national/international entity to assign zoning to
servers, but someone already has to assign them IP addresses and urls, right? The zone
could be embedded in the IP - i.e. all educationally zoned servers start with a 1, medical
with 2, etc. Once you're zoned (and there would of course have to be criteria for
zoning, which is probably where the real discussion lies), the person in charge of putting
pages up on the server would have to preview them to make sure they fit the zoning
criteria. If not, the page is not banned from the Internet, it just has to find an
appropriate server to get posted on. The gist of this is that filters could then filter based
on "zoning". So libraries could filter out - or better yet, SELECT - all the zones they
feel might have content that meets their mission. A medical library could pick only
medically zoned servers. A school could choose educational, recreational (maybe) and
medical. At home you could do what you want.
Although this is somewhat similar to "ratings", I think it's subtley different. Pages could
be posted on more than one server if they really fit more than one "zone" and really
wanted the exposure (maybe some sites would be both educational AND recreational). It
seems to me the person in charge of putting stuff on the server, say at a college, already
has to at least give their files a quick once-over, so making sure they fit the zoning
requirements wouldn't be too much trouble. If some big companies basically "lease"
server space to anyone who will pay, they can either get zoned and approve pages, or
choose to stay unzoned. At least we'd have an idea that unzoned servers could have
ANYTHING on them. Similarly, if my neighbor puts up a server in his living room for
his own pages, he can either "get zoned" or choose to stay unzoned and risk getting
filtered out by those who don't trust unzoned servers.
Does this make any sense? Would it have any benefit over ratings, or does it just bring
up the same issues that ratings do? I'd be interested in any discussion, preferably on the
list so we can all brainstorm together.
Thanks for letting me share my 2 cents worth of deep-thinking about the future of
information technology management.
Sandy Brooks
Eastern CT Libraries