[ih] internet-future mailing list ?

[Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history]

On 17-Dec-19 10:15, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
> It can be kinda fun to try to look into the crystal ball.

However, it can be humbling to look back at predictions you
made in the past. Been there, done that, and been humbled :-(.

For example, they thought I was a pessimist when I said that
IPv6 deployment would take 15 years.

   Brian

> 
> 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.

-- 
Internet-history mailing list
Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history