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

[Andrew Sullivan]

Dear colleagues,

I am anxious not to go too far away from the list's charter with respect to history, and I'm aware that part of what I'll say below has more to do with some thinking about the future, so I'll ask a question that does require speculation but is intended especially for people who were directly involved at the time.  (I was an undergrad in part of the period people are discussing in this thread, and by the time I got access I think the situation was different.)

The questions or observations are inline below.

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 01:11:28PM -0500, Karl Auerbach via `Internet-history wrote:
>"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.

Andrew Russell's argument in _Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks_ (Cambridge UP, 2014) casts this cultural difference in another light: that the OSI approach embodied (or, and I think this is my gloss, "was hobbled by") old-fashioned governance models that were in an important sense more open than the ARPANET/Internet work that led to TCP/IP.  For, he argues, the Internet innovators had to satisfy only one customer: the US Defense Department (or, depending on exactly when, [D]ARPA).  By constrast, the OSI work as well as work that happened before that were international efforts that involved many different parties, sometimes with competing interests, and that used the mechanisms of co-operation used in other places in societies too (like voting etc.) to make decisions.  In this account, the problem OSI and other such efforts faced is basically that they could not move as fast as those who needed only to satisfy a single "customer" of the work.

I'd be extremely interested to hear people's reactions to his argument.  (If the only version of it you've heard is my third-rate summary above, then I'd urge you to have a closer look at his work before reacting too strongly.  I was sceptical of the view when I first encountered it but I found his scholarship compelling enough that it gave me more than one way to think about those episodes.)

>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.

Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections on the attitudes of the societies at the time.  For instance, kc claffy once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than lock it into any particular corporate ownership.  I know there is another thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that the USG could give such a technology away as they did?  I find it impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits.  (And, to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at the current USG or any people in charge of it.  This has seemed obvious to me for a decade or more.)

>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.  

The final question I have (inspired by Karl Auerbach's mail) is admittedly a bit of alternative history.  It seems to me that one of the things that has caused some trouble both in the wider social sense and in the network's operation itself is concentration and consolidation: too few companies with too much money and too much network power (in both the literal Internet sense and the societal-network sense) to resist.

Yet to a large extent, those effects follow from the emergence of the web as opposed to the Internet proper.  Now, while the Internet is (I'd argue) fundamentally a distributed technology (and one that encourages growth through greater distribution), the web is in some fundametal way centralizing.  The importance of the host-part of a UR[I|L] is illustrated, even, in the way we talk about web _sites_: the emphasis is on control of publication (contrast this with Usenet).  When hypertext was adapted to the web, one of the things that got left out was the bidirectional nature of the conceptual model, for the obvious reason that links that went in both directions would be mighty hard to implement under distributed control.  But what if either there had been a way to inject your back-link to another's page when you made the forward link, of if the web hadn't delivered and we'd ended up in some other technological world?  Is there any reason to suppose that another design would have been more resistant to centralization tham what we have turned out to be?  (If this is too far off the strict historical charter, I understand and will cheerfully take responses off-list if that seems better.)

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca