[governance] Another Immovable Legal Object Meeting An Irresistable Internet Force (this time it ain't Taipei...

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 19.08.11 11:07, Roland Perry wrote:
>
>> Still, the phone network was pretty much different everywhere.
>> The end-user had absolutely no choice.
>>
>> Not so with Internet.
>
> The Internet is very different, there's already at least four 
> different wifi standards to cope with, and more different cable-modem 
> configurations than I can count (which is why you don't tend to get 
> that functionality built into a PC where it would be a tenth of the 
> cost).
>
> Therefore equipment is far less standardised (even if people often 
> build in backwards compatibility for things like wifi).

No doubt. But I was talking about the network -- once you get connected, 
with Internet too, you are subject to all kinds of control attempts. 
Most obvious are the various protocol manipulations that hotspots and 
the like do "to serve you better".
Or the various protocol manipulations that are done in order to sniff 
your traffic "because we must catch criminals". Or the criminals 
themselves, diverting your traffic for whatever purposes.

With Internet, where the intelligence is at the end-nodes, you can 
bypass at least most of these "for your good" control measures.

(just wondering when will the accusation of proposing criminal 
activities will pop up :))

>
>>> >You remember the e-mail "standard", X.400.
>>>
>>> Yes, but that's neither a telephone nor the Internet.
>>
>> Yes, but it was product of the ITU.
>
> If an organisation produces very many standards, it's hardly 
> surprising that some don't reach world domination. Is the demise of 
> Gofer an indication that the Internet is poorly designed?

We already got out of context for my original statement.

My original statement was that ITU has designed a lot of (apparently 
technical) standards with the benefits of their membership in mind. This 
is not a coincidence.
The X.400 example is very good, indeed. It is good, because at about 
that time SMTP e-mail became accessible to the masses -- the same target 
customers for whom the X.400 service was designed (the commercial part, 
that is). The X.400 providers could not deal with the competition of 
SMTP, because of this very "feature". The protocol specification was 
later amended to fix it, but it was too late. X.400 became commercial 
failure, although the protocol itself was better than SMTP (at the time).

By the way, the ITU has done great job on standardization over the years.

>
>> Everyone should be thankful ITU does not govern the Internet!
>
> I've never suggested they should.
>
> ps And what is "The Internet" In this conversation it's not the 
> content people see through their browsers, but the mass of largely 
> telco-operated telco-standard connections which transport the traffic.

"The Internet" is the collection of it all. All of the 7 ISO layers and 
more.

I understand for many people Internet is just bunch of wires 
interconnected and some people who offer services over that.

If it was that simple, we would not discuss 'governance', because 
regulating bunch of wires is easy -- every government knows how to do it.

But above level 1 things get complicated. There have been many attempts 
to regulate for example, assignment of IP address space. So far most 
telecom laws expressly exclude regulating IP addresses and domain names, 
because the authority for those reside outside their jurisdiction.

Going up the layers, for most people 'the Internet' is the applications.

You say the mass of the Internet infrastructure is telco-operated, 
telco-standard. I say it is no longer the case.
In some countries, this is not the case for over a decade. There is dark 
fiber, that has seen nothing else but Ethernet. There is copper, that 
has seen nothing else but Ethernet. There is also wireless ('wifi' or 
'microwave') that has see nothing else but Ethernet.

I hope you will not call Ethernet telco standard. Internet does not 
require 'telco' to transport it's traffic.

Daniel

PS: I just checked, there is not a single serial interface in operation 
in the thousands of routers, nation-wide network I run.
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