[governance] The decentralization of IP addresses

[Bill Woodcock]

> On Nov 28, 2015, at 8:36 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at internatif.org> wrote:
> Your texts are impossible to understand, and the little that is understandable is hopelessly confused. Your proposal is "not even false" (by which I mean it is not possible to make sense of it, and then to determine if it's true or false.)

Specifically, they are “Non-Logical Arguments,” assertions which cannot be tested by logic.  Or they are “Ambiguous Assertions,” which may be interpreted in different and conflicting ways, yielding different results.

Others are Appeals to Complexity or Appeals to Convenience.

> On Nov 28, 2015, at 6:23 PM, willi uebelherr <willi.uebelherr at riseup.net> wrote:
> An ISP oriented network is impossible.

Or Denial and Argument by Dismissal, in this case.

> On Nov 28, 2015, at 6:23 PM, willi uebelherr <willi.uebelherr at riseup.net> wrote:
> We never need any form of address/name management, if we use a real physical object. And this is strong compatible with the needs for our telecommunication. People, real existing subjects, act. And not any virtual instances.

Although this portion of your argument is familiar to me, because it make it myself (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/us/finding-who-and-where-within-the-sports-cyber-betting-universe.html), the premise is misapplied to your argument.  Layer 3 objects do possess specific, if not necessarily unique, addresses, and through aggregation, those addresses correlate to some degree with the physical topology of the network.  But that should not be misconstrued as a correlation with physical geography which exists, when at all, only by coincidence.  So, this argument is a form of Dicto Simpliciter, falsely asserting a general truth supported by an unrepresentative sample.

The more interesting question raised by your message is whether the services people are interested in are the numerically-addressable Layer 3 objects, or the very high-level conceptual services.  Is Wikipedia a “real, physical object?”  Or is it an intangible structure of information and thought?  Is it possible to assign Wikipedia an integer based upon a geographic location?  If so, how would that geographic location be chosen, if not in a completely arbitrary, or even random way?  Would real human beings in Beijing and Seattle and Lagos all intuit the same physical geographic location for the Wikipedia service?  Would they all intuitively know and agree, for instance, that it resided at 44.5905° N, 104.7155° W, and if so, how many such numeric addresses might they be expected to remember?  If the correlation between the service that people are interested in and the address is completely arbitrary, and can be intuited neither by the human attempting to reach it nor by the router attempting to forward the packet, of what value would such an “address” be?  And would it even qualify as an “address” in any sense of the word?

If you have answers which address the questions in the preceding paragraph without logical fallacy, we might have the basis of an interesting conversation.

                                -Bill




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