Sunday, April 15, 2007

More on the Net, Neutrality, and it's finality.

The internet has been around since Sept. 2, 1969. That's when Leonard Kleinrock supervised the first exchange of data over ARPANET

Almost 40 years later, the Internet is carrying and supporting mindboggling amounts of information, and it is only increasing as more people get connected.

Some that have been there since the beginning, think it's crazy that it even works as well as it does (!)

It's not surprising that engineers want to re-tool the underlying infrastructure of the web, but increasingly researchers are calling for scrapping the entire thing! Many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to deal with the issues of mobility, security, and other challenges that have cropped up since Moore's Law started rolling down the global tack.

What is interesting to this blogger are some comments in the Yahoo/AP piece that were made by Google's "Colin Powell" of Net Public Relations, Mr. Vint Cerf. He wasn't quoted directly so his words may be tailored somewhat to make the authors point, but the inference is well...I'll just copy the quote and let you decide:

Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was "generally healthy" because the current technology "does not satisfy all needs."

I'm not saying TCP/IP ain't great because it is (I don't think anyone thinks it should be scrapped), but here's my question...

...on a philosophical level, the expectation to treat each packet equally is strained when it's acknowledged that the network doesn't satisfy all needs, isn't it?

Just sayin'....


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