[ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[Karl Auerbach]

I don't think it is fruitful to try to assign any blame to what we and 
others did with the Internet or ISO/OSI ... we were all exploring a new 
world.  We, in the Internet community, tended to come from the "lets try 
new ideas and see if they work" point of view, while others, such is 
ISO/OSI came out of an older bureaucratic tradition.  And we all make 
mistakes - and I find it unfortunate that many of us (myself included) 
find it hard to say "oops, I goofed" or "I didn't fully understand what 
I was doing". Mistakes are the lampposts that illuminate the better 
paths we ought to have taken.

What I want to mention is that on the Internet we are undergoing a 
revolution in perspective.

And at the same time our 1960's/1970's sense of "a seamless network for 
all of us, for the world" seems to be being assaulted by a new sense of 
regionalism; nationalism; religious exclusion, isolation, and 
protection; and simple protection against criminals and intruders.  This 
change is breaking our once seamless network into pieces.

For most of us we think of the net as a means to move packets around, 
unvexed in their flow end-to-end, and for a few higher level protocols 
to assemble those packets into meaningful streams (often with security 
wrappings.)

The revolution that I am mentioning is coming from users who view "the 
net" more as an assemblage of applications that work with one another - 
texting, social media, voice/video meetings, maps/navigation, etc.  
These users really don't care much (or know much) about the things we 
think of as "the Internet": they really are not concerned with packets, 
transport protocols, TLS, routing, DNS, etc.

Another way to put this is that in the minds of today's users the 
network has moved up a level of abstraction - where we were concerned 
with getting packets and protocols deployed they are thinking of the 
interoperation of their favorite applications.

This means, at least to me it means, that the elegance of the underlying 
packet and transport plumbing - our Internet - has become not only 
something like a utility, but also opens the door to some radical 
changes deployed in local contexts - such as using things like China's 
IP proposals in parts of the net that are transport layer proxied from 
"our" Internet.

(BTW, I am not aware of how well China's IP proposals are fairing.)

         --karl--