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

[Jack Haverty]

IMHO, if there were a ubiquitous IP-level multicast of some type that 
could be observed to actually work in the vast reaches of the Internet, 
people (app developers) who could use it would do so.

But "ubiquitous" is important - a mechanism that only works in some 
places isn't as valuable as one that works everywhere  (a corollary of 
Metcalfe's Law?).   A mechanism that only exists in one or a few ISPs 
isn't useful unless you expect all your customers to be using that 
ISP(s), and all of the network paths your customers use (to interact 
with their own customers etc) are also confined to that same ISP(s) who 
support the mechanism.   Those ISPs of course would need their equipment 
vendors (routers, switches, hosts, whatever) to also play the same game.

This relates to my discussion in that talk about TOS bits as a 
placeholder.   We knew that an infrastructure like the IP network should 
likely offer more services than just unguaranteed datagram delivery 
("We'll deliver it.  Maybe.  Eventually.  Hopefully."), and that 
research was needed to figure out what those services should be and fold 
them into the spec for the next generation.

That didn't happen so people invented whatever adhoc mechanisms they 
needed at some "higher level" where they could just write the code 
themselves - continuing the "rough consensus and running code", and put 
their own "servers" (e.g., CDN equipment) wherever it was needed, 
relying only on the basic unreliable IP datagram delivery service to be 
ubiquitous.

Such "silo-ization" seems to be everywhere now and increasing ....email, 
messaging, video chat, forums, ....

Sigh,
Jack