[ih] A paper

[farzaneh badii]

Thank you for  reading the paper and providing your feedback.

You said:

"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!"*


We actually said exactly the opposite. We said adoption of a technology can
be for a myriad of reasons and design decisions are not inherently
political. But perhaps since you don't like our style of writing it was not
clear to you.


Farzaneh


On Sat, Jul 17, 2021 at 6:12 PM Bob Purvy <bpurvy at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>
>