[ih] A paper

[Jack Haverty]

I don't have access to the IEEE archives, but IIRC Baran's point was a 
technical one - that there shouldn't be any single central computer that 
was managing the network by performing functions such as setting 
routes.    That's true, and was incorporated in the ARPANET IMPs, where 
no IMP was "in charge" and if any IMP (or even the NOC) failed, the 
remaining IMPs could continue operating just fine as a functional network.

What I was referencing was a non-technical design decision -- the notion 
that there shouldn't be any single person, corporation, or organization 
"managing the network".   The ARPANET, and IIRC all other networks of 
the day, were under a single organization's control.   The Internet 
tried a different approach, where "no one in charge" was the design 
principle.   EGP/BGP was part of the technology to implement that 
policy, although at the time the motivation for EGP was simply to make 
it possible for other people to build a gateway and experiment, while 
keeping the "core" at least safe from disruption.

As a side effect, such mechanisms may have introduced something like a 
"right to connect" enabling anyone with a router to join the Internet.   
But we didn't really think about that at the time.   You still had to 
find someone already inside the network willing to add a wire connecting 
their router to yours.

Apologies if I got the Baran info wrong; I read that paper way too long 
ago....

/Jack



On 7/18/21 7:14 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 19-Jul-21 13:03, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> ...
>> One of the design principles of the network (which
>> may not appear in "documentation") was that the network must not have
>> any single point of control, no one in charge.
> That was indeed the key to worldwide success, far beyond its necessity
> for "national security" reasons. Even today, the Internet seems
> remarkably hard to switch off, even in totalitarian states.
>
> I think it is in the documentation. Paul Baran wrote it down explicitly,
> way before ARPANET was conceived.
>
> [BARAN, P. 1964. On Distributed Communication Networks, IEEE Trans. on
> Communications Systems, CS-12:1-9]
>
>      Brian