[ih] ARPANET pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

[Miles Fidelman]

John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> It appears that Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> said:
>>     > On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 8:46 PM Jack Haverty wrote:
>>
>>     > One that I used in the talk was TOS, i.e., how should routers (and TCPs)
>>     > treat datagrams differently depending on their TOS values.
>>
>> I actually don't think that's that important any more (or multicast either).
>> TOS is only realy important in a network with resource limitations, or very
>> different service levels. We don't have those any more - those limitations
>> have just been engineered away.
> That's not it, they came up against the impenetrable barrier of a
> business model. We understand how to price peering and transit of
> traffic where all packets are the same, but nobody has any idea how
> you do it where some packets are more valuable.
>
> I never figured out why multicast failed.  It is bizarre that people are dumping
> cable service which has 100 channels multicast to all of the customers in favor
> of point-to-point service where you frequently have a zillion people streaming
> separate copies of the same thing, e.g., a football game.  We fake it with CDNs
> that position servers inside retail networks but really, it's multicast.

Well... probably because carriers were trying to charge by the 
bit/packet, and vendors were trying to sell centralized, proprietary 
videoconferencing services.  Interoperable multicast makes it all too 
easy to distribute such things.  (Consider the demise of CuSeeMe and IRC 
- can't see that Zoom or the myriad of chat services improve on the 
originals.)  Sigh...

Miles Fidelman


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown