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

[Vint Cerf]

actually I was thinking about average users but your point about
professional licensing is an interesting avenue to explore.

v


On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 6:46 AM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> From what you say, are you referring to what the average user should know
> or what the average engineer working in the infrastructure?
> For the latter, it seems there Certifications  for the really vocational
> ‘license’ but for say researcher or developer it would be quite different.
>
> John
>
> On Apr 29, 2026, at 05:55, Vint Cerf <vint at google.com> wrote:
>
> 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--
>> >
>>
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>
>
> --
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> Vint Cerf
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-- 
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