[ih] a single organization "managing the network"

[Toerless Eckert]

Reminds me of some financial network that had two pretty
independent physical network infrastructures for resilience. But only one
management plane / operator entity that could roll out changes across both
networks. Guess what happened so that this "single administrative" approach
was changed. But hey, that was just some billion of money trading network
where you loose millions $$ per unit of time when it does not work, but you 
don't loose something irreproducable.

Are current Internet archive mirrors at least versioning, deduplicating archives
that never throw away old versions ? That would a least protect against loss through
origin mistakes.

There are the IMHO really evil proof of capacity cryptocurrencies that will
cause disk space to be more and more abused. I wonder if it would be possible
to design a cryptocurrency such that the space wasn't wasted but was
some, at least privately reversible mirror of an actual useful data set,
such as (parts of) the Internet archive. Ideally with an incentive to cache
data that the least number of other participants have cached he same data -
which could/should create incentive for even amoun of caching across a
large dataset...

Pretty sure this will not work. Otherwise there wold be something useful
coming out of cryptocurrencies..

Cheers
    Toerless

On Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 03:32:05PM -0700, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
> Jack Haverty wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> The Internet Archive is facing the same dichotomy today.
> 
> It would be better if there were multiple replicated copies, owned and
> filled and operated by different organizations in different parts of the
> world.  If those orgs could cooperate to exchange updates, even more
> better!
> 
> At the moment, there are several replicated copies of the IA corpus,
> automatically updated, but they are all under the control of a single
> organization, which can suffer any of the maladies of organizations.  If
> that org totters or fails at some point before the data is replicated
> outside its own control, then a large fraction of the history of our
> culture will be at serious risk of loss.
> 
> It took a genius to create it.  It won't take a genius to distribute it.
> Just a realization that the corpus is becoming too valuable to leave
> inside a single point of failure.
> 
> 	John
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

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