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World of Ends
epeus writes "At World of Ends, Doc Searls and David Weinberger explain the End-to-End nature of the internet in terms so clear even your manager could understand them. 'The Internet isn't complicated. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement. The Internet is stupid. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.' and so forth."
On an offtopic, but very interesting tangent, that is an extremely interesting, scary thought. If a nuclear bomb went off in St. Petersburg and 50 megatons of H-bomb were headed for every major city in the US, what would Slashdot report (assuming the editors knew it was going to happen - remember, this is hypothetical). Weird.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
This reminds me why the original MSN failed and Yahoo succeeded. Microsoft wanted to control the content providers (making them use its own proprietary tools), while yahoo used HTTP and HTML.
Sure, absolute control might mean they can offer more features, but absolute control also means everyone can't play. The file format of Microsoft Word was closed, and so it is hard to write programs which understand it. Microsoft gets richer, but users can't get their own data. Finally, when Microsoft sees there is no other big driver to get users to upgrade, they open up their file formats.
The internet succeeded because of its simplicity, and because of HTML and HTTP. Almost anyone can serve HTTP. And write some sort of HTML. The protocols are simple and well documented.
In manager speak value=money.
:"Internet is stupid".
From rule 6 and 4 , money moves to suburbs and adding value to internet lowers its value. So the suburbs have real low value. Now rule 5 says All of internets money grows on its edges, again edges=suburbs . So rule 4 and 6 together contradict rule 5.
So if all these rules hold at once, Internet is real complicated, hence rule 1: "Internet is simple" is false.
So only rule 2 holds
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Today, many so-called internet users have their access mediated by firewalls and NAT. This reduces the set of internet services available to them.
(I'd even say, as a slight exaggeration, that their ISPs had engaged in false advertising by calling it "Internet Access")
By the original definition of the internet, anyone with access (control of one host) could send packets to any address:port combination, and open any port to inbound connections.
This means that everyone with internet access should be able to run an HTTP, FTP, or UT server. But many people are prevented by their ISP's routing policies.
Firewalls and NATs supposedly "add value" to the internet by making it safer for some users. But it's not made a lot safer (worms get through even today), and it has "lowered value", because creating new applications is more difficult. For example, today there is a movement towards SOAP; XML-RPC. Unfortunately, one of the motivations to promote it is to allow arbitrary, application-specific traffic to travel over port 80. To work around firewalls which only permit HTTP, we're starting to see a legitimization of tunneling commands over HTTP.
(I'm not saying that was the original goal of SOAP- but sneaking around firewalls is one reason that some developers are eager to try it)
So there's an example of why "adding value to the Internet" is generally bad.
However, there are cases where it may be good. We all know that IPv6 will be a postive (someday). Multicast extensions to the internet were developed well after it was first created, and are generally accepted as a good thing, although their deployment so far is well short of universal. Multicasting is a superset of existing internet functionality (assigning a single packet to be destined to multiple recipients).
Multicasting may turn out to have downsides, depending on how it's implemented (and I haven't followed development closely enough to be sure what the direction is). If it creates an unfair environment, where large corporations (CBS, MTV, RIAA) can create multicast streams, but individual users cannot, then it will cement inequality and make internet use move closer to resembling traditional television viewing. I feel justified in hoping this won't happen, however.
And QoS (quality of service) is a debatable issue, not a flat-out bad one like the article suggests. IP, the existing internet protocol (not to be confused with Intellectual Property), makes no guarantee that packets will arrive quickly or in order. It doesn't state that packets will travel at the same speed as each other. It doesn't even state that a packet which is sent will ever arrive, only that the network make a "best effort" at getting it through someday.
Since IP makes no guarantees of transmission speed, adding an optional mechanism to request QoS efforts won't break the existing protocol definitions. Yes, it may disturb some people to consider that internet packets, which used to be fair and unbiased, may someday have preference given to them based on the sender's bank account- but look at the alternative:
Basically, there are only a few internet applications which really need low-latency response: speech, video, gaming, and maybe some forms of web browsing. Everything else, especially emails and big downloads over HTTP or FTP, would work absolutely fine with 10 or 100 times the per-packet latency.
As long as there is a reasonable bound on how much faster a quick, expensive packet is than a slow, cheap one- say, not more that 100 times slower- QoS won't block any people out from using the internet, and it'll make it cheaper and easier for high-speed users to get going.
I was referring to the "by adding value, you take away value" line in the writeup, and apologize for not making this clear. I certainly didn't mean to make digs at either the writeup or the site, I was just making a witty observation without the wit.
HTH, and have a nice day.
This site is a reprise of some of the themes that were in their book from a few years ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto. It is still available online. I think of the internet as a kind of infrastructure that nobody owns, like a highway. The potential perils are of a takeover of large companies that want to make you carry p(Assports) or "pay tolls" to cross into certain parts of it. They are the ones who, in the words of the book, believe in "engorging people with material goods so as to make them poop out dollars". The internet has another potential that is not so crassly commercial: for self-expression, for the acquisition of knowledge, to be able to connect with others wherever concerning almost anything. People have the ability to turn away from the crassly commercial, if they choose to see something else of value besides what the popular culture puts before them.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
Filtering contents adds value, right?
ISP level filtering is one of those things which some people think adds value to the internet, but really damages it. Host-level filtering, however, is a voluntary, application-level process which the host can disable at any time. This is why improvements to the internet should come at the application level (where they can be easily changed and removed if they turn out to have downsides), rather than deeper in the network (where it's harder to convince the sysadmins that you need changes made to do your work).
(Host-level filtering may still be damaging in some cases, such as in a library whose users are forbidden from modifing local software. But that is a separate issue)
Music downloads adds value, right?
From the Internet's point of view, music downloads are "just another file transfer application". They are beyond the scope of section 4. They "improve" the internet by providing another use at the ends. But, as you may have noticed, DRM-based music downloads aren't very popular yet. That's because, as the authors suggested, non-open protocols lack explosive popularity.
an even more fragile piece of DRM-crap
I think that the majority of music-downloaders still manage to find non-DRM files. Not as much as when Napster was running, but it still seems that most music downloads wind up as MP3 files on multiple, redundant CDRs.
Hypothetically, the RIAA might someday propose modifying the internet to make their music transfers more secure, and that would be bad.
(If they could push DRM onto 80% of newly manufactured PC hardware, that would be very bad for other reasons)
The Internet is a way for data to get from one computer to another. Latency mostly comes from the protocols placed on top of IP, such as TCP. I don't think there is a good way to prioritize packets. And implementing such a system would require discarding the current IP, and all the supporting software, and probably a significant amount of hardware.
I think what the article was trying to say is that most people, and especially business and government do not understand the nature of the Internet. To improve quality of service, the ISPs basically have to hold to existing open standards, provide a decent line in/out, and cut down on the extraneous garbage
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
--Thomas J. Kopp
Latency mostly comes from the protocols placed on top of IP, such as TCP.
It's true that TCP adds a kind of latency when it stops to wait for a retransmission. But UDP messages on their own have a lot of latency. For most users, most of that latency comes from the first mile and last mile links (especially if they're on dialup).
However, there are sources for latency deep inside the internet as well. Congestion. Actually, the most commonly damaging form of congestion is when someone else on your subnet is making a large download or streaming radio, and you want to run an interactive (VNC or SSH) session.
A non-FIFO router protocol might help alleviate this. It could recognize that the 95% of packets beloning to a big download can afford to wait until the VNC user's mouse-updates have gotten through.
I don't think there is a good way to prioritize packets.
There might be. It could be as simple as a single bitflag for "normal/fast". We'll never know unless we try. And we can't try until packets have a way to indicate desired QoS (the IPv6 "flow label", for instance), and more importantly, users enjoy some financial benefit, however small, for selecting reduced priority for their data.
Of course, there are other things which need to be fixed with the internet before it presents a fair place to test QoS. In particular, firewalls and NATs already block some of the applications which could best make use of QoS, so until they're removed, there'd be little point in doing the experiment.
Well first post or not, the whole end-to-end paradigm of the stupid network, is so simple and brilliant with economic abundance and endless innovation for everyone, except the telcos, that the only reasons we are not seeing the benefits is because of corporate welfare and monopoly power being given back to the Telcos. I say get them out of the way by letting them die fast in the free-market. We have everything to gain it. Now if only Michael Powell, FCC head, would get the simple message thru his head.
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