[ih] A paper

[Bob Purvy]

This is nearly unreadable (but I persevered). However, there are also more
serious flaws which I point out below.

My background: I was at 3Com in the late 80s, although I did not help with
TCP, DNS, BGP, or WHOIS. Later I led the group in 1994 that led to RFC 1697.

Unless I missed something in the authors' backgrounds, neither of you have
any Engineering training. So naturally, you think that adoption of a
technology *cannot* be because it just works or doesn't work. *Surely there
must be some political reason! It can't just be that something is correct
or incorrect!*

This is a critical failing when analyzing why TCP won out over OSI. TCP was
driven by rough consensus and running code, while OSI was driven by
international politics and giant telecommunications companies. TCP had the
advantage that people came together, brought their code, and interoperated
with other people's code.

Most famously, the “warhorse” technological determinism of a Marxist
variant already present in classical political economy produced the
teleology of historical “stages” powered by changes to a society's economic
forces.

Famous to whom? Marxist theorists?

Engineers may participate as individuals in the IETF, but it does not
follow that their contributions are equally individual. Instead,
participants—and especially the most influential individuals—are there with
the support of a firm with a direct interest in the outcome of the design
and deliberations.

This is completely wrong, although it may be more nearly correct if you
look at it from 1990 on.

In the early days of the IETF, the participants were *not* big companies.
The big companies mainly ignored it, or came as observers. The people
driving it were academics, for the most part, either professors or graduate
students; or else employees of research-oriented organizations like BBN,
Rand, and ISI. The driving force was personality more than corporate
interest (and, of course, being right, which doesn't factor into the
worldview of social scientists).

If you're sponsored by *any* organization, you're going to be influenced by
their priorities, of course. But the sponsors were mainly not giant
companies as they are now, and it was not obvious that there were trillions
of dollars at stake (even if there were).

Any protocol that contributed to the (DARPA) Internet's rapid ability to
scale was thus implicated in the struggle between a loosely DARPA-led group
of famously (but perhaps not altogether) technocratic or meritocratic
engineers and a far more open and multiconstituency decision-making process
at OSI. It was the expertise with which corporations sent skilled
representatives to derail negotiations and successfully push their
corporate interests that massively influenced OSI design and that was in
part responsible for OSI's delays and the victory of TCP/IP.


Utter nonsense again. Anyone could join the IETF discussions and many with
no institutional backing at all ended up with influence. As I said,
personality and technical smarts mattered more than corporate interest.

Corporations did not send "skilled representatives to derail negotiations
and successfully push their corporate interests." You are completely wrong
on that.


On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 9:16 AM farzaneh badii via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Filder and I have published a paper recently about Internet protocols and
> human rights but had a historical look at WHOIS, BGP/EGP and DNS. We
> greatly enjoyed the informative conversation about BGP and EGP on this list
> and helped us a lot with providing a more complete background.
>
> Here is the link to the paper:
>
> https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.11.2021.0376?refreqid=excelsior%3A5f6e0042f4bc042a36aa87e2a4d0107c#metadata_info_tab_contents
>
> <
> https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.11.2021.0376?refreqid=excelsior%3A5f6e0042f4bc042a36aa87e2a4d0107c#metadata_info_tab_contents
> >
>
>
> Farzaneh
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
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>