Re:The Internet origin story you know is wrong
by mlyle on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @11:45PM
(#31831814)
> the idea that the Internet was designed to route around damage
See, e.g. Baran's writings from 1964, about decentralization, fault tolerance, and survivability of packet switched networks and directly lead to the ARPANet and internet:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html
> shred of evidence I could find in favor of something like an ideology of decentralization
As to decentralization among many providers-- this only really comes into play in 1989, when BGP emerged, and the NSFNet began to connect regional networks and ISPs and internet exchanges began to flourish-- though you can find Baran writing in the late 1970's about the connection of multiple networks and ensuring that single providers or colluding groups of providers are not too powerful.
But it was a goal from the beginning. E.g. Pouzin, 1973:
"Actually, this last approach boils down to the construction of another network, and ultimate at that. ... This is not to say that a general internetwork agreement will never happen, but that it will happen gradually... This study attempts to put forward a realistic scheme allowing point to point message transfer across several independent packet switching networks.
This requires a common agreement in formatting messages, but constraints are minimized while preserving implementation freedom and efficiency."
Of course, many questions remained-- protocol translation vs. common protocol? How to do this all, without dynamic routing? What about the regulatory landscape, etc. We lucked out into a pretty good outcome, overall.
> could also treat censorship as a form of damage
This is a feature of the culture of the 'net it existed in the 80's and 90's based on experience with Usenet (which indeed does kind of route-around-censorship in many cases, but also engendered a group of users who culturally subverted attempts at censorship), and not a feature of the internet protocols themselves.
See, e.g. Baran's writings from 1964, about decentralization, fault tolerance, and survivability of packet switched networks and directly lead to the ARPANet and internet: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html
> shred of evidence I could find in favor of something like an ideology of decentralization
As to decentralization among many providers-- this only really comes into play in 1989, when BGP emerged, and the NSFNet began to connect regional networks and ISPs and internet exchanges began to flourish-- though you can find Baran writing in the late 1970's about the connection of multiple networks and ensuring that single providers or colluding groups of providers are not too powerful.
But it was a goal from the beginning. E.g. Pouzin, 1973:
"Actually, this last approach boils down to the construction of another network, and ultimate at that. ... This is not to say that a general internetwork agreement will never happen, but that it will happen gradually... This study attempts to put forward a realistic scheme allowing point to point message transfer across several independent packet switching networks. This requires a common agreement in formatting messages, but constraints are minimized while preserving implementation freedom and efficiency."
Of course, many questions remained-- protocol translation vs. common protocol? How to do this all, without dynamic routing? What about the regulatory landscape, etc. We lucked out into a pretty good outcome, overall.
> could also treat censorship as a form of damage
This is a feature of the culture of the 'net it existed in the 80's and 90's based on experience with Usenet (which indeed does kind of route-around-censorship in many cases, but also engendered a group of users who culturally subverted attempts at censorship), and not a feature of the internet protocols themselves.