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

[Hesham ElBakoury]

By Chinese IP proposal do you mean New IP which to the best of my knowledge
it did not go well in IETF.

Hesham

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 1:11 PM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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--
>
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