[Chapter-delegates] ISOC open letter

[sivasubramanian muthusamy]

Sivasubramanian M



On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 1:11 AM John Levine via Chapter-delegates <
chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> It appears that Mike Godwin via Chapter-delegates <mnemonic at gmail.com>
> said:
> >
> >Steve, this is one thing that has struck me as odd as well. My view of
> >"layers" has been that it's a kind of metaphorical way to taxonomize
> >different functions and services--at best a kind of heuristic for
> picturing
> >and grasping how the internet works. But some people have decided
> >(apparently) that the taxonomy or heuristic is an articulation of first
> >principles.
>
> This also shows a painful ignorance of history.
>
> Back in the day there were implementations of network protocols that
> carefully implemented each layer separately with clearly defined
> interfaces between each. They all shared the characteristic of being
> stupendously unusably slow, and in many cases impossible to debug
> because all of the interfaces offered an exponential explosion of ways
> to screw up.
>
> The pragmatists that built the Internet defined interfaces where they
> were useful and didn't obsess about places where they weren't.  There
> were a lot of experiments some of which succeeded (most of Berkely sockets)
> and some of which didn't (the Ethernet trailing header hack.)
>
> Unfortunately, most of the people with that experience are close to
> Steve's age, and there aren't a lot of them left to remind us of why
> our networks work the way they do.
>

That makes it very important for the Internet Society to ask Steve, Vint
and others to document in greater detail, with documentation assistance
provided on the scale of a Book Publisher, how the Internet was built, the
difference between Internet and the Web, the difference between Internet
and Google (to help us understand that the Internet is not Google +
Instagram + Whatsapp), what are layers, how layers are sacred, how layers
are politically and commercially messed up, and why it is important to make
the Network work the way it should. Their work is much more than that of
imparting this understanding, but in this context, it is one of the top
most items in a To Do list.


>
> R's,
> John
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