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

[Vint Cerf]

John D,
your note made me wonder about what most people should know about the
digital ecosystem. I've characterized this, sometimes, as studying for an
Internet Driver's License. What should you know before navigating the
Internet?

v


On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 5:52 AM John Day via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Well said.
>
> A combination of that and what you could convince others to do, given
> their corporate desires were different, comfort level, their experiences
> were different (or lack thereof). (I have found that if you have never seen
> certain kinds of solutions, it is not easy to see that they could exist or
> have further implications.)
>
> I agree with your view of the users. Just yesterday, I told someone that I
> was working on the things that ’they shouldn’t have to know about.’ On the
> other hand, that infrastructure can have a profound effect of how the
> applications work. The ‘fragmentation’ you speak of also seems to be
> working on the infrastructure.  Isn’t the use of CDNs moving applications
> to the so-called ‘edge’ making the infrastructure as well more ‘regional’
> in some sense?
>
> But there is another issue here:  What do we teach those who are learning
> about that all of this?  Do we just teach them how it works (which I
> consider vocational)?  Or do we try to teach them what we learned? What not
> to do? How to do it better? IOW, do we teach them to do better or to repeat
> the same mistakes?
>
> It has been awhile since I saw any of the ‘official' Chinese IP stuff.
> What I had seen was far from impressive. Nor have I heard how it is being
> received. Some of the academic work I have seen submitted to SGOs is pretty
> bad. If you know otherwise, I would like to see it.
>
> Take care,
> John
>
>
> > On Apr 28, 2026, at 16:11, Karl Auerbach <karl at iwl.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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--
> >
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe:
> https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
>


-- 
Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
Vint Cerf
Google, LLC
1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
+1 (571) 213 1346


until further notice