[ih] internet-future mailing list ?

[Karl Auerbach via Internet-history]

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.
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