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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."
So what I will say is that this has got to be one of the most confusing, yet clear topics I've read on /. in a long time.
I hope he goes for a real-world case study -- the end to end transfer of a given porn movie. Definetely something your manager can read and relate to, plus it gives you an easy springboard onto such topics as average throughput, burst transmissions, etc :)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Because (at least by the writeup) it sounds like they're delivering some sort of Zen-style analysis from within a cloud of blue smoke. How well does the sound of a hand stream over the Internet?
Oh God I missed the "of" at first.
Heaven help us. I found out about Armageddon on slashdot.
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Despite this article's annoying use of absolutes (I know, I know, they're effective, but I hate it when people write an article as if its the last thing that will ever be written on that subject), they're mostly right. Think about it. We can do more on the Net now than 5 years ago, despite the best efforts of the RIAA, MPAA, US Govt, and pretty much every corporate interest out there. I have a feeling this will continue into the future, too.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
So the Internet is destined to fail?
Yes, Doc & Dave have set themselves up to be misinterpreted with those particular headings.
It makes sense if you read the text, and see that "improve it" in item 8 doesn't mean modifing the internet in any way- only modifying protocols that use it.
"Adding value" to the internet, on the other hand, would mean changing the internet itself, which would break old applications, and make it harder to add new apps.
Well, I tend to disagree. It tends to make people stupid though, and it's hellishly smart at that as well. Just look at this place :-)
No, you're stupid, you big stupid!
Signed,
The Internet
PS: I'm rubber you're glue
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I wonder if Al Gore realized this when he invented it...
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
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.
A lot of people thought that the whole purpose of the industrial revolution was to use inventions like the cotton-gin to expand their plantations for unlimited controll and profits. While most people saw the invention as a great tool to end slavery, for others it was impossible to think of wealth in any other terms other than the size of a plantation, a farm, or estates. These people pushed slavery controlls to the point of civil war and were responsible for the deaths of millions.
I think today we have the same problem with "intellectual properties". It is impossible for people to think of wealth in any other terms than the number and amount of industires and people they can extract royalties from. It is impossible for them to understand that properties are not just about government edicts, or personal incentive, but natural forces - like everyone not being able to use the same thing at the same time. Well, with information - they can. And that is the real value of the internet.
Think in i.e. Riverworld of P.J.Farmer, you have a river that connects all places in the world, the river is owned by nobody, everyone can use it, and everybody can build whatever they think around and over it, but if you change the river itself (contaminating water, redirecting or trying to stop it, adding to it some drink concentrate to make the water taste better, whatever), all the world loses, they can't use the same river in all the possible ways that they could before (and, if I remember well the book series, you will face a war very soon :)
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.