[ih] internet-future mailing list ?

[Miles Fidelman via Internet-history]

It occurs to me that we might want to discuss things we'd LIKE TO SEE, 
rather than predictions.  And for that matter, projects that we know of 
/ are working on, that might lead in certain directions.

Miles Fidelman

On 12/16/19 4:15 PM, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
> It can be kinda fun to try to look into the crystal ball.
>
> One thought that struck me a few years back was a recognition that 
> "The Internet" (with or without capitalization) is rather like the 
> elephant in the fable about the blind men: it is perceived as many 
> different things.
>
> For those of us here "The Internet" may be conceived as a system that 
> carries IP packets from hither to yon where that hither and yon are 
> identified by globally unique IP addresses.
>
> Others may view the net as the world wide web.
>
> I would suggest that if we asked younger users and engineers that we 
> would get a rather different answer: that to them the net is composed 
> of interworking applications like Instagram or Twitter or TikTok.
>
> From that application-centric point of view things like "end to end 
> principle" become merely a disposable detail of inner plumbing.  Does 
> it really matter to Twitter users whether the underlying machinery is 
> elegant and free of media transitions and proxies?
>
> And from another perspective I've seeing a lot of movement, often done 
> under the banner of "optimization", back towards circuit switching 
> notions - or rather, hybrids in which packet routing is ever more 
> forcefully constrained into fixed paths (especially for data flows for 
> conversational audio or interactive video that have severe latency and 
> jitter constraints.)
>
> And might one consider the 5G movement (even without millimeter wave 
> technology) as a new ISO/OSI (but better designed to co-exist with 
> existing IPv4/6 infrastructures.)
>
> A few years back I wrote up one view of where the net could be going.  
> It was somewhat pessimistic.  However the intervening years have not 
> adduced much evidence to the contrary. 
> https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/internet_quo_vadis/
>
> One of the more interesting aspects of my own delving into Internet 
> history has been that there were many roads not taken. Some of those 
> roads could be re-explored.  (My own favorite candidate for that would 
> be to revisit what the ISO/OSI people did so badly that few 
> comprehended its value: a persistent session layer above transport.  
> Had we had that we would not have had to explore inelegant things like 
> mobile IP or HTTP/S cookies.)
>
>     --karl--
>
> On 12/16/19 10:40 AM, Toerless Eckert via Internet-history wrote:
>> I was wondering why there is no "internet-future" discussion list
>> here on elists.isoc.org given how there is an "internet-history" 
>> mailing list.

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

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