[governance] phones vs. the Internet, was NTIA announcement on JPA

[John Levine]

>> Hi, Milt.  Actually, it's factually right.  The phone system is not
>> one system, it's a bunch of national or regional systems connected
>> together with gateways, more analogous to the way e-mail worked in the
>
>And what is the Internet if not a bunch of local, national, regional or
>corporate data networks (often using different standards, from 802.11x
>to frame relay to Ethernet to others) connected together with "gateways"
>called routers and proxy servers running TCP/IP?

The architectures are quite different.  At the IP and TCP levels the
Internet is completely homogeneous, with the link layers being
abstracted below that.  As I pointed out in my previous message, at
the analogous levels the international phone system is not, and it
does not have a global naming database analogous to DNS.  (E.164 is a
document, not a database.)

If you can't be bothered to learn how the phone system works before
spouting off, there's not much we can do about it.

>But both have a chokepoint for global coordination.

You know, repeating something doesn't make it true.

>One word: SS7.

Two words: en-bloc and compelled signalling.  Sheesh.

R's,
John
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