[ih] internet-future mailing list ?

[Dave Taht via Internet-history]

Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
writes:

> 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.

Ironically enough morton satirized that poem here:

https://gettys.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/the-blind-men-and-the-elephant/

It was six men of Interstan,
 To learning much inclined,
Who sought to fix the Internet,
 (With market share in mind),
That evil of congestion,
 Might soon be left behind.

...

> 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.

And communicate via email. Email is seriously dying. If we want to have
a serious discussion of the internet future with those creating it, we
need to move to whatsapp... and us old farts need to reach out to them,
not them to us.

In terms of my mailing list subscriptions, I doubt I've had more than 3
new users a year since 2014. 

> 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 platforms, not protocols, rule the day. Until the economy collapses
again, and all the money losing companies on which this new era is
dependent on either get bought or collapse. Take cloudflare, as one
example...


> 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.)

I am increasingly fond of circuit switching. The switched telephony
network was so much better than what we have today - a call across town
was like whispering into your lovers ear. Then we accepted first, a
10ms, then a 20ms compromise in voip, and, if you measure a typical cell
phone call, it's in the 100s of ms... and ghu help us all in the case
of a major earthquake, war, or tsunami.

I think a lot of reason for worldwide rage and frustration is how badly
our voice communications infrastructure currently functions.

>
> 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.)

I would like to consider the open source folk, also, as a movement,
one that has lost much steam in recent years to make effective change.

>
> 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.)

I keep pounding away at eliminating buffering. Lately - even though
fq_codel is a billion+ strong - I despair - the tsvwg is inudated with
folk trying to ressurrect old ideas like ecn and paid prioritization,
ISPs and wifi and 5g still have seconds of excessive buffering, and
despite solving that problem with inbound shaping and/or clever code...

well, for example, I just bought a new ubnt mesh ac AP. The linux kernel
version is 7 years old. Sometimes it feels like progress at the low
level has halted in favor of pretty guis and falsified benchmarks.

>
>     --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.
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