somehow
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The Future of the Internet-And How to Stop It » Chapter 2: Battle of the Netw... - 1 views
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one another.
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But imagine the cost and inconvenience of every appliance having its own network ... so the ability of th enetwork to re-purpose itself is also important to diffusion of technology.
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connect to it.
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Network architectures and protocols work in an environment in which certain behaviors are assumed ... and new assumptions on behavior lead to new desires for network configuration; trustworthiness is an important such behavioral dimension.
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- ...54 more annotations...
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networking
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Regulation, not jsut technology, made it hard to make the telephone network useful for anything apart from telephoning.
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Hush-A-Phone, which was invented in 1921 as a way to have a conversation without others nearby overhearing it
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were sold.
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The court drolly noted, “[AT&T does] not challenge the subscriber’s right to seek privacy. They say only that he should achieve it by cupping his hand between the transmitter and his mouth and speaking in a low voice into this makeshift muffler
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small ways.
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phone network.
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Court principle in 1940s: "as long as network is not harmed, 3rd parties can hook up to it".
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The physical layer had become generative, and this generativity meant that additional types of activity in higher layers were made possible.
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services business
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The modem on the "open" ATT network was first generative opportunity for hobbyists and businesses
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THE PROPRIETARY NETWORK MODEL
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themselves
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Firt online services were along IBM model but consumer-facing; one company supplied the lot.
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unchanged
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In 10 years of business, between 1984 & 2004, Compuserve hardly changed its array of offerings.
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tinkering
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Compuserve piggy-backed on ATT network, phy layer generativity, but did ot itself offer 3rd party acces for generativity.
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Why would the proprietary services not harness the potential generativity of their offerings by making their own servers more open to third-party coding?
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model prevailed.
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Information service companies were charging by the minute - so why didn't they want to cultivate 3rd party apps?
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shopping
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free-for-all
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By early 90s, a small umber of networks offered slightly differentiated, closed, monolithic services.
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who built them.
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The answer is probably deep in organisational behavior: mature markets encourage exploitation of niches, not radical exploration of new models.
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possible.
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Hobbyist BBS encouraged the opposite incentive of proprietary netowrk: bandwidth limitation meant that users had to be as quick as possible.
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Jennings’s work
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FIDOnet - the original p2p file sharing system - got over some of the bandwidth limitations.
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annoyed person.
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FIDOnet was a great kludge, but had some real issues - like wrong numbers in the call list ... and irate humans at the end of them.
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the world
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FIDOnet problems were exactly the problems that ATT worried about when it wanted to limit 3rd party appliances on the network - who was to blame for quality of service.
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FIDOnet
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Internet offered flexibility of FIDOnet with robustness of proprietary network.
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services
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PC Internet analogy: Internet connects to proprietary networks and eventually replaces them
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message
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From the first, Internet is designed to pass information along diverse computer platforms by defining protocols.
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points
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Internet was low level: allow 2 nodes to exchange information ... and that is all; no prejudgement of what people want to do with that information.
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billion
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Internet builders were academics who could devote time to the project and yet were doing it for the innate interest; $10m or so spent on Internet between 1969 and 1990 --- great return on investment, from a social point of view.
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from them.
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Environment of creation is critical in determining the nature of the system: Internet pioneers were trying to get the most out of existing infrastructure and diverse netwroks; contrast business logic of FedEx network.
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network work.
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The motto among Internet pioneers was, "We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code;" they were building it for themselves, in a sort of Kantian environment of universalisability of the user.
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controlling it.
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1991, backbone privatisation context also allowed for decentralisation of network ownership and operation.
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tryout period
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access
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1991, first opening of Internet to non-research uses; by mid 90s, proprietary networks were branding mainly as ISPs --- generative boom was gathering unbelievable speed.
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code for it.
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Internet was built away from commercial logic, no trying to guess what the conusmer wanted; just like the hobbyist PC.
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harmful code.
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Basic trade-off: consistency, quality and reliability of service (closed systems) versus breadth of uses, trust of open systems.
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rust that at least some third-party software writers will write good and useful code, and trust that users of the device will be able to access and sort out the good and useful code from the bad
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approach
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Intenret design choices made sense given a sociology, not just an negineering environment.
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requirements
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Procrastination principle: 1984 Internet engineer academics formuilate argument that only universally useful features should be built into the network, with other specific work being done at the end-points.
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Its origins can be found in a 1984 paper by Internet architects David Clark, David Reed, and Jerry Saltzer.
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The people using this network of networks and configuring its endpoints had to be trusted to be more or less competent and pure enough at heart that they would not intentionally or negligently disrupt the network.
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persists today.
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Yet the assumption that network participants can be trusted, and indeed that they will be participants rather than customers, infuses the Internet’s design at nearly every level.
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an outsider.
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Banks are built for robbers, airports for terrorists ... the Internet was built for colleagues.
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the IDs.
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AOL/CompServe had identity management built-in: wanted to know who you were for marketing purposes ... good for accountability, too.
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contents
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On Internet, identity-management was left to specific service providers or apps to choose.
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User identification is left to individual Internet users and servers to sort out if they wish to demand credentials of some kind from those with whom they communicate.
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regulation
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There's good and bad in internet's anonymity -- can't pursue bad behavers, but can't get the freedom fighters against oppressive governments either -- but an engineering decision has ended up havign huge social impacts.
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The person at the endpoint must instead rely on falling dominos of trust. The Internet is thus known as a “best efforts” network, sometimes rephrased as “Send it and pray” or “Every packet an adventure.”
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Internet as "network of networks" loosely cobbled together entails the inability to develop quality of service, or bandwidth agreements, that apply between any 2 points.
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chapter
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"bit egalitarianism" is assumed in the network, and fixes have been found along the way (eg Akamai & network caching).
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environment
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Crucible of development - collaborativ academis -- strangely made something that thrived beyond it and gave world this wildly generative environment.
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dead end.
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Is the appliance and the proprietary network an evolutionary dead-end?
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ignore
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The generational pattern of generative technology: small-world success, big-world expansion through commercial forces, limitations of the model; limitations now may threaten the ethos that amde it so good, but limitations are real.
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what cheap processors would small firms and mainstream consumers be using today? One possibility is a set of information appliances.
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That is proven, with cell phones, iPods, calculators. More broadly, it can be said that nongenerative appliances coexist with generative devices. It's not so clear whether one subverts the other without a lot of force behind it.
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I'm not convinced of the direction here -- the Brother or Smith-Corona appliance typewriter was supplanted not by a generative product, per se, but by Word Perfect, WordStar, Microsoft Word, and other competitors. No open-system revolution brought this about, only high-stakes competitive market cannibalism. It was not the open programmability of the PC and Mac that inaugurated the market, but the plug-and-play capability of the new product, coupled with the price point.
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dial-up modem
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Better known as the "acoustic coupler," which gives the layman a better idea of its shape and function.
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minicomputer
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You mean mainframe, correct? Also worth a mention is CBBS and the other hobbyist networks that predate CompuServe, et al.
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