Internet Society Internet Hall of Fame 2017 Inductees, 18 Sep 2017

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From YouTube: Internet Hall of Fame 2017 - Nabil Bukhalid

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Nabil Bukhalid - Global Connector Inductee in the Internet Hall of Fame 2017 receives his award at UCLA, September 18 2017.

https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/nabil-bukhalid

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Our first global connector led the team at the american university of beirut, that brought the internet to lebanon, and established the lebanese domain. Registry.

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nabil bukhalid.

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Thank you.. It's said that many of the inductees were at the right place.. I was at the wrong place at the wrong time. (laughter). I was in beirut in 1998..

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It's a war ridden city where ravaging civil war was.

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Bringing destruction and killings and damage to the assets- and I was.

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A biomedical engineer,, hiding myself.

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Actually, in the hospital. living in there, practically living, I there and, to isolate myself from the craziness outside,.

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I was playing with computers and looking at networks.

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And,, despite all odds,.

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With a group of friends at the university,.

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We were looking into solutions to break the isolation of aub.

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From the academic environment in the us.

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So we started to look into connectivity.

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Being excited about that,, I somehow.

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Find myself leading the team into an enterprise that seems to be quite impossible,.

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I mean a far-fetched dream.

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And, after many trials to connect the university.

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To bitnet, to earn, to the internet, and failures,.

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Being the solution by -- also the taif agreements,.

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That was supposed to bring peace to lebanon, but brought impunity to those who were destroying lebanon,.

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I migrated to, with my wife and a baby daughter,.

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To canada. in montréal,.

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I quickly realized that the urge to connect lebanon to the internet.

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Was burning inside me., so I kept on seeking solutions, and I was one of the lucky people who were invited by george sadowsky.

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To inet 93,, where I was on the technical track.

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And under the lead of randy bush,.

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And that was really a paradigm shift.

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During that summer, at stanford,.

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Randy bush was instrumental in helping me.

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Find a solution for the chicken or egg first puzzle,.

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By connecting -- by hosting the .lb.

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Services on psg.com infrastructure.

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And that way I was able to go around the monopolistic problems that we had.

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I mean, what looked like a telecom infrastructure in lebanon.

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And second,, I met wonderful people and I became engaged with the internet society,.

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The most beautiful society that I've ever been in,.

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And worked with.

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and that opened really the horizons and permitted me.

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To develop and copy that society in lebanon.

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And create a large group of members.

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I mean, we have 650 members in internet society in lebanon,.

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Which is, I believe, quite quite large, as a group,.

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And we created an environment that is --.

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For many, they believe it is an evasive environment,.

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Because still, the government is a monopoly, and while we manage everything based on a multi-stakeholder bottom-up structure,.

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Offering most of our services pro bono.

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To the community,, and by that way, we're evading the regulations,.

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And the established monopolies., they don't know what to do with us.. We are people putting pro bono services and somehow they don't know how to treat us.

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And we established some sort of strong roots because we are a very large community..

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It became influential. and really that's my story.

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I would like to thank the internet society., I'm humbled and honored to join the list of inductees.

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That I've always admired and respected..

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I would like to thank all those who nominated me and supported my nomination.. I would also like to offer special thanks to my family,.

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To the american university of beirut, to my team at cns, to isoc lebanon, founding members and lic founding members.,.

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Thank you., (applause).