Middleboxes vs. the Internet's End-to-End Principle

arglebargle_xiv writes "The Internet was designed around the end-to-end principle, which says that functionality should be provided by end hosts rather than in the network itself. A new study of the effect of vast numbers of middleboxes on the Internet (PDF) indicates that this is no longer the case, since far too many devices on the Internet interfere with traffic in some way. This has serious implications for network (protocol) neutrality (as well as future IPv6 deployment) since only the particular variations of TCP that they know about will pass through them."

Comments

Re:Internet with middle boxes like sex with a cond

[jamesh]

And the most lost on the most people at once analogy award goes to...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condom for anyone who doesn't know. If only i'd known before my 4 kids were born... (hi kids, if you're reading this!)

Re:Internet with middle boxes like sex with a cond

[1s44c]

I'm posting this Anonymously so I can mod anyone who replies with 'whoosh' as a troll. 'Whoosh' was never funny.

I messed that up.

Re:What

[smash]

Exactly. End-to-end as a mandatory access scenario is for GNU hippies like RMS who believe in unicorns and that everybody should hold hands an sing.

The ABILITY to do end to end transit when both parties agree to such is a very good thing to have, yes - but to assume that end-to-end should always work in the real world where we have assholes out there who want to rip you off (money, cpu, bandwidth, etc) and basically fuck you over is never going to be realistic.