[ih] principles of the internet

[Matthias Bärwolff]

On 06/01/2010 10:00 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

Best effort to me seems absolutely central to the "Internet
architecture" -- I'd recommend reading Metcalfe's thesis' chapter 6
which really nicely elaborates the notion.

> 
> 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.

+1 the avoidance of the nxm problem is all over the literature from the
time (also, Padlipsky's term "common intermediary representations" comes
to mind)

> 
> 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/

-- 
Matthias Bärwolff
www.bärwolff.de