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What The Internet Isn't
looseBits writes "Doc Searls and David Weinberger, co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, have put together a 10-part guide for how to stop mistaking the Internet for something it isn't. It contains some painfully obvious and often overlooked characteristics of the 'world of ends' we call the Internet."
Its not incorrect as much as simplistic. The author refers to "the internet" like "the government". What is the government? Its not congress or the president or even the dmv. Thats "A government". "The government" is simply an agreement between 2 people. I agree to give up some of my freedoms and in return you give up some of yours (or none of yours depending on what type of government we are talking about). Now that does not describe in any way what "A government" is or how it works but it is the meaning of "the government". In the same way "The internet" is just an agreement between two people where one agrees to send data to the other. This doesnt tell you what "an internet" does or how it works or what yopu can do with it but it is still accurate.
"But wait!" you say.
"What do you mean AN internet? Isnt there only one internet?"
No there are many internets just like there are many governments. A LAN is a type of internet. It simply uses a different agreement just like in China you give up different rights then you do in the US.
These 10 points may sound obvious to the slashdot crowd, but to many people they are not. Unfortunately, the content owners are trying their best to turn the Internet into another channel on your television set. And the national governments do not have a reason to prevent it. And since many people are blissful in their ignorance of this issue, they will not even complain if the underlying freedom of the Internet is slowly taken away.
The part about the Internet "routing around damage" is an important feature that will be central to the battle over the future of the Net. It has taken the content owners and the government awhile to realize this property of the Net. That's the reason for the increased push for DRM and tightening copyright laws. I believe it is also the reason for the increased push for governments to directly "govern" the Internet. The fact is that the Internet makes many governments uneasy. It's a very large, uncontrolled system.
But the most important thing for us to fight to protect is the end to end connectivity. As long as I can connect to the person to which I want to communicate without going through an "approved" centralized server, the basic features of the Net will stay intact. It will be hard for the government to change this without completely destroying the value of the Internet. But I don't think that will prevent them from trying.
My prediction is that we will see increasing talk about changing the Internet to "protect the children" and "stop the terrorist from using the Net" as entry points for stricter authentication, auditing, and control, as well as increased centralization of the structure of the Internet. As much as I hate the thought, I think it's inevitable. Now that I've depressed myself, I'll take off my tin foiled hat.
You confusing the web with the internet.
The internet itself is made up of many parts: email, usenet, IRC, world wide web, ftp, telnet the only thing they really have in common is that all of those work on top of IP (internet protocol).
The internet itself works fine on just about every platform. The services provided on top of that may be hit or miss depending on how and who impliments them.
Of course, you knew that, but a surprising number of people think that the web is all there is to the internet. I've met CS majors who still don't quiet get that AIM is part of the internet. They'll send me a message and say "my internet is down".
"...how did you send me this message?"
really they're just having some site not resolving.
I do take issue with that particular writeup, although it is true in many senses.
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:
The way I see this, prioritizing packets also ensures that a minority of users can't abuse the network ressources the everybody else want to use.
No, fair queueing ensures that a minority of users can't monopolize the network's capacity. Prioritizing packets based on applications hurts all other applications.
Prioritizing packets within your own network is fine because you know what you want. The core of the Internet doesn't know what you want, so there's no way for it to provide reasonable prioritization.
I don't agree. The internet is well defined in what is called the "internet protocol". And this protocol is just an agreement on a way to communicate. It is not like a government. It isn't more than that. People use it for lots of things and different kinds of communications but that doesn't make more than an agreement.
A government is much more than a simple agreement. It is define by more that one simple protocol. That people use the phone to talk about a lot of things does that mean the phone is more than a way to talk to each other?
A LAN is not a type of internet. It can use a subset of the internet protocol, but to be an internet, you have to connect multiple LANs trough gateways.
And usually when people refer to the internet, they mean the main one that most people connect to.
The problem with the Internet as an advertising medium is that it works backwards from the mass media. We're used to having ads thrown in our face, and that's the only paradigm that MegaCorps are capable of dealing with right now. Fortunately, there are many tech savvy thinking individuals who are more than happy to build ad blocking infrastructures that render bulk advertising moot.
Right now an internet presence is not necessarily a profit center, but a lack of one can certainly cost you money - more and more middle class (and up) people are turning to the internet first for information about what product they will buy or service they will use.
In the end, the internet presents the nightmare of true value comparison; the advertising that it's ideal for is comparison research; backwards from the current model which resembles a firehose, this becomes "on demand" advertising.
I research nearly every major purchase on the internet prior to spending money. It has saved me a lot of money, in the long run; whatever product I am considering, I can usually find posts somewhere on the web from someone who has one, and is either really happy, or really unhappy about that fact.
Someone mentioned QOS and bandwidth hogs vs backbone bandwidth - network bandwidth will increase until there are essentially no bottlenecks. It's a fact. Eventually, our network connection will exceed our local bus speed now. QOS is a stopgap measure to shoehorn technologies onto the 'Net before it's grown to accomodate them.
Thinking outside my Head
Sounds like some damn rant. The bloody FCC never did nothing right. Their cahooting diffusion with ICANN and the registrars, and phone companies . . . Then the audio/video hogs woke up and attacked . . . Soon a bunch of outta-loops was doing File->Save As->Web site. Heck I got some shovels to sell any prospector foolish enough to philosophize about protocol awareness.
It's really all about the breaks. The break between content provider and audience. The wireless and wired networks. When the right people or products coalesce - will it be a monopoly? Open-Source wireless networks deployedtoday are the only way to ensure bandwidth for open-minded transmissions later. As TimeWarner if the offer Movies, VoIP and Broadband in uncompetitive markets . . . Who can stop them? Congress? Ha! Al Gore they ain't and that fool backed Howard Dean!
I did not get much from the article at all - and think it was an esoteric sailing trip. But I too wrote a rant, so there was some stimulus. Like the style of Kurt Vonnegut my satire aims to ape: [Context] x [Subject] x [Amplitude] x [Frequency] x [Time]
Stuff that matters.
Sure does. At least until "Trusted Computing" comes along and takes control away from the individual at the hardware level. In such a scenario, subversive software like Freenet would never be "trusted" (by an authority other than YOU) to execute locally, and even if it could (like on chinese blackmarket hardware), its packets would be deemed "untrusted", and dropped, by the new breed of UN-approved "trusted" routers.
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Power to the Peaceful
The one problem is that such a system would require centrally-managed routing. How do you guarantee constant-rate packet flow unless there's a central authority monitoring traffic flow? Adding a priority control layer to IP communications will require someone telling us what priority our traffic may be given, else everyone will just set the checkbox labelled "all traffic priority 1" in their network settings and **poof** the utility is gone. It's bad enough with ICANN and Network Solutions pulling the bullshit they can now, without adding that to the mix. Do you really want those NS clowns (or a totally new bunch of clowns) telling you "Priority 3 is free, but if you want Priority 2 clearance, that'll be $5/megabit; Priority 1 is $25/megabit"?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Actually, that GIF shows the amount of data that's on Kazaa at any given moment, not the size of the Internet.
The Internet encompasses infinity (especially in the number of pornographic files). How can we describe it, then? I quote Adams:
"Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that infact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real 'wow, that's big,' time. Infinity is just so big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!