[ih] Preparing for the splinternet

[surfer at mauigateway.com]

In: https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/internet_quo_vadis

You mention: "The island-and-bridge internet is coming.  It’s not going to come as a tsunami; it’s going to come as a slow incoming tide."

How do satellite networks play into that?  It seems they will overcome the "only one bridge crosses the moat" thing.

scott




On Sat, 12 Mar 2022 01:56:51 -0800, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

On 3/10/22 5:02 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Internet-history wrote:

> EXCERPT:
>
> According to Wikipedia
> , a
> researcher at the Cato Institute first used the word "splinternet" in 2001
> to describe the idea of "parallel Internets that would be run as distinct,
> private and autonomous universes."

Well, "splinternet" it isn't quite "Internet history", it's more of a
prophesy of things that could come.  And I sense that none of us want
disjoint "splinters", and I don't think users want that either.  But if
we use the analogy of wood then today's Internet is nice, clear lumber.
And what we have called "splinternet" might be gluelams or fiberboard,
i.e. many pieces that are joined to form something that is at least as
strong and useful as a timber cut from a single tree.

If we expand our view of Internet History to encompass predecessors we
see that that "splinters" have existed yet the system as a whole
provided acceptable service to users.

Perhaps the earliest system that used store-and-forward handling of
electronic messages was the telegraph system that arose in the 1830s. 
Although it was never a single technically uniform global system, it did
have "splinters" that worked acceptably well and were sufficiently
joined so that from the users' point of view, it was one system.

(We can say the same about the voice telephone system, but I view that
more as a circuit switching paradigm rather than store-and-forward
message handling.)

I, personally, am of the belief that just as the Internet began as a
single network and then became a network of networks, i.e. an Internet,
the time may be near when we add yet another tier; that the Internet
evolves into a network of internets.

How this may come to pass is uncertain.  However, I believe that the
weak fracture plane is that users no longer care about elegant
end-to-end principles but, rather, live in a world of Apps and those
users care nothing whether the underlying plumbing is elegant or a
jumble - the users only care that their favorite Apps work.

Early Internet protocols needed end-to-end connections.  But as the
years passed more and more protocols were designed with the idea that
they could operate via relays and proxies.  SMTP was an early one, HTTP
a later one.  It is that acceptance of proxies and relays that reduces
the strength of the end-to-end principle to act as a glue that holds the
Internet into a single system.

(This is not a negative reflection on those protocols; it is merely the
recognition that a useful and common "feature" may also become the means
through which the net could separate into realms that touch one another
only via relays and proxies.)

I wrote about this some years ago in note I titled "Internet: Quo Vadis
(Where are you going?)" at
https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/internet_quo_vadis/

        --karl--


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