[ih] principles of the internet

[Richard Bennett]

It seems that you're not reaching back all the way to the beginning in 
your search for principles, and have therefore landed in some of the 
mythology rather than the core ideas. It seems to me that you can't 
describe the Internet without acknowledging two facts as primary:

1. Packet-switching. The Internet is one of a series of exercises in the 
practical application of packet-switching technology to computer 
networking that began with ARPANET and continued through SATNET, PRNET, 
CYCLADES, the Internet, DECNet, XNS, SNA, and ISO OSI. The Internet 
protocols all more or less assume a packet-switching service, and in 
cases seek to control this service.

2. Internetworking. The Internet assumes that there will be a service 
that transports IP reliably. The Internet also defers certain decisions 
about the management of packets - or frames, to be more precise - to a 
networking function that is specific to a given technology such as 
ARPANET, PRNET, etc. Hence the Internet specification is incomplete by 
design, insofar as it leaves the layer two and layer one design to the 
operator of the layer two networks.

Many of the principles in your list - simplicity, end to end, and 
symmetry, for example - are actually side-effects of the project, which 
was inter-networking packet-based networks built on diverse technologies.

The Internet protocols are agnostic about privilege and best-effort, as 
these are layer two functions that are simply outside the scope of a 
system that goes from layer three to layer seven (or whatever number you 
assign to applications.) So the absence of a particular function in the 
IP stack doesn't always mean that it's frowned upon, it can mean that 
it's expected to be provided somewhere else.

I don't know that economics has much to do with this, beyond the 
assumption that packet-switching is more economical for human-computer 
interactions than circuit-switching is. The Internet wasn't designed by 
economists.

You do have to beware that the Internet has developed its own hype 
machine that imbues it with all sorts of magical properties that 
probably werent' in the minds of its original designers. The End-to-End 
Arguments paper, for example, followed the design of the protocols by 
nearly ten years, so to the extent that it describes the Internet at 
all, it could only be taken as a post-hoc explanation. And it doesn't 
even pretend to describe the Internet really, it's a general tome on 
distributed systems.


On 6/1/2010 11:07 AM, Matthias Bärwolff wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am in the middle of an argumentative research exercise in which I try
> to map a set of principles that are central to the Internet (descriptive
> principles, as informed by practices and universality of applicability;
> not normative principles following purposes other than system stability
> and individual liberty). Since most here have plenty of hands-on
> experience I would be very appreciative of some feedback -- on-list,
> off-list; long, short; however you like it.
>
> I made up the following list:
>
> 1. original end-to-end arguments and economic efficiency concerns
> (speaking to completeness and efficiency of implementation)
>
> 2. modularity, minimal coupling, and layering (speaking to the general
> architecture)
>
> 3. least privilege, and best effort (speaking to the actual shape of the
> interdependencies)
>
> 4. cascadability and symmetry (speaking to the rules of efficient and
> flexible protocol design)
>
> 5. running code, complexity avoidance, rough consensus, and path
> dependence (speaking to the governance process and its stability)
>
> Thanks for all your takes.
>
> Matthias
>
>    

-- 
Richard Bennett
Research Fellow
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Washington, DC