[ih] principles of the internet

[Dave Crocker]

On 6/1/2010 11:49 AM, Richard Bennett wrote:
> The Internet protocols are agnostic about privilege and best-effort, as

Absent standardized QOS, IP is best effort and the transport-level reliability 
mechanisms reflect this, even as weak as they were (intentionally) made to be.

This was a major shift from the degree of delivery assurance attempted for the 
Arpanet IMP infrastructure, which was reflected in the /lack/ of host-to-host 
reliability mechanism in the NCP.


> these are layer two functions that are simply outside the scope of a

Except that layer two is not end-to-end and therefore cannot make end-to-end 
service assertions or enforce them.


> 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.

Cost-savings, by avoiding NxM combinatorial explosion of communications lines, 
was an explicit and frequently cited motivation for the work, at least in terms 
of what I heard when I came on board in the early 70s.

Surviving a "hostile battlefield" was the other, which meant conventional, not 
nuclear, conditions.  At the time, I believe folks didn't quite anticipate that 
commercial communications environments would also look pretty hostile...


d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net