[ih] A paper

[Bob Purvy]

"adoption of a technology can be for a myriad of reasons" -- can you be
specific? Are there some decisions you think were *not* made for technical
reasons? Particularly in the 80s.

On Sat, Jul 17, 2021 at 3:29 PM farzaneh badii <farzaneh.badii at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>