Mañana 

discuss

Best wishes to you and yours for the season. Hope all is well with you.

Forgive me for hijacking this seasonal opportunity to say a few words about the "services" debate that seems to be going on at present.

Mail, DNS, printing, "ID." None of these services exist *in* the Net.

They are all provided, independently and without permission at the edge, and the debate about what the net should, shouldn't, does or doesn't provide seems a bit odd knowing of the Craig Burton model of network transparency.

I don't need no steenkin' badge to communicate across that vast ever growing transparent sphere that Craig describes, and that David Isenberg, David Reed et al talk about, or was defined by the TCP"slash"IP protocol separation in conjunction with "End-to-End Arguments in System Design" to be.

If the net is to be "terraformed" it will be only on the outside. Putting stuff "in" the Net, breaks it, particularly with respect to innovation.

The net is as inherently anonymous as the road. It is as accessible as the road. Not sure who builds the roads in your country, but here it is the commonwealth, or "the collective" <grin>... Perhaps that would sound better if I referred to municipalities... The whole "Commie" thing seems to shut a lot of brains down.

Capitalism and commerce are great, but sorry, at the end of the day there are things that are desirable that the invisible hand will not deliver.

The "connectivity" that Bob Frankston talks about or the paradoxical network of David Isenberg. Even Craig Burton describes infrastructure as an "enigma." I think this derives from the insistence on "business cases" and "shareholder" value. I benefit from the public gardens in my city, without which I would not live there... this is the "business case" and "shareholder" value of infrastructure, improving the world in which you live. You can imagine how repugnant I find the "absentee landlord" style of foreign ownership of infrastructure. They want their return in cash, rather than the improved conditions in which they and their neighbours (geographical) live.

Connectivity, and Paradoxical networks are good for users, and not, alledgedly, for operators. Don't operators use networks?

Like most things, there is a dual nature and more than one solution is required. Like you suggest, not "P2P" but "PwP." Myself I think there are very very few solutions that are XOR, one or the other but not both. Far more frequently the answer is not which, but both. The trick is to ensure you have environment in which both are possible.

Such an environment is probably a meta-design one, where the choices are deferred as long as possible ("Premature optimisation is the root of all evil"), and left to the user, not the designer.

So, the net, is it a pipe or a place? Is the street? I think the answer is both.

About all this digital ID stuff, that's just a security thing isn't it? From the confidentiality integrity availability model of security, CIA, where the I is integrity, isn't that what your Digital ID is? Your "untamperable" reputation?

If that's the case, then according to Dr Reed, Steve Kent pointed out (and perhaps others have too, it's a big net) putting such "services" in the net is a terrible risk.

When we talk, and you illustrate so well with the layers from the long now, about separating services from transport, this dichotomy includes both the providers of same, and the "location" of the services and transport. IE, the services do not belong *in* the transport, they are delivered through it, creating via the pipes, a place that has that service.

The services and the transport are one thing, the services, another, the transport another. When I write of the "net" I'm talking about the transport and that to me is the Internet. The rest of it, Usenet, email, WWW, whatever is next, that's the stuff either on top of or at the edge of, the Internet...

Hamish.

PS. Some of the places I stole this stuff from, <grin>

http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=paper&fn=endofendtoend.html http://www.satn.org/about/separateconnectivity.htm http://conferences.oreillynet.com/presentations/os2002/doc/ http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_12/fischer/index.html
Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, 1972

discuss

This is what I was getting at when I e-mailed you a couple of weeks ago. Don Norman points it out in The Invisible Computer. Infrastructure is a winner-take-all proposition, which leads to - how you say - "natural" monopolies? Still not clear on what that means exactly, but that's how it was explained to me.

Thus MS, and not just the OS. Word and Outlook display de-facto infrastructure characteristics. In my biz, e-learning, authoring almost always has to happen in Word. Because everyone uses it, it attracts support, which drives everyone to use it, whether it's the best tool or not. Which may explain why it theoretically does everything except my laundry. Competing infrastructures, akin to standards, don't remain competitive very long.

Seems to me the net is a new commons, as mentioned here, like rivers and streams still are (at least east of the Rockies). There's not much evidence that the market mechanism will in any way protect this resource without regulation and protection spurred by a lot of vocal activism.

Even the scarcity / abundance argument plays in here. I was thinking of making the comparison (glad I didn't) about water rights east and west of the Rockies. I believe that in the West the private ownership of water contributes to the Water Wars. But it's a bad case because scarcity is also an issue. Here in the east it's never been a scarcity issue, yet the rivers have been polluted for decades, and still are to the extent the regulations allow, and beyond. Norlin's abundance argument, doesn't eliminate local, temporal scarcities that drive demand and pricing within their limits.

I like the road comparison too. Made me think of Kerouac, and who will write the comparable work. Maybe you! Maybe us!

Dave Feasey
Eyepopping Design

discuss

This is what I was getting at when I e-mailed you a couple of weeks ago. Don Norman points it out in The Invisible Computer. Infrastructure is a winner-take-all proposition, which leads to - how you say - "natural" monopolies? Still not clear on what that means exactly, but that's how it was explained to me.

Thus MS, and not just the OS. Word and Outlook display de-facto infrastructure characteristics.

We're talking about two different kinds of infrastructure here. What you and Don are talking about is platform infrastructure. It's something only commercial companies seem able to do. And while it may cover a lot of ground, and achive near-ubiquity, it isn't the deeper kind of NEA stuff that the Net is made of. That's what I try to get at through talks like this one about infrastructure. If Word- and Outlook-type infrastructure were the only kind, we would never have had the Net. Companies like Microsoft and AOL — and even IBM and Sun — often contribute to deeper infrastructure, but they fall short if they insist on owning and controlling it. Case in point: Sun with Java. Close, but no cigar.

Back in the days before the Net, we used to talk about "standards" and "openness" as insfrastructural ideals; but we lacked a universal infrastructure to concretize those ideals. Now, thanks to the Net, we have that infrastructure. And it's important to make a distinction between that kind of infrastructure and the infrastructural stuff that sits on top of it.

In my biz, e-learning, authoring almost always has to happen in Word. Because everyone uses it, it attracts support, which drives everyone to use it, whether it's the best tool or not. Which may explain why it theoretically does everything except my laundry. Competing infrastructures, akin to standards, don't remain competitive very long.

Word isn't the standard here. It's the .doc file format. Thanks to StarOffice, OpenOffice, ThinkFree and other compatible products, that format is likely to stabilize as something essentially outside Microsoft's control. My prediction, anyway. At the very least it'll become harder and harder for Microsoft to keep forking the format with every new revision of their own versions of Word.

Seems to me the net is a new commons, as mentioned here, like rivers and streams still are (at least east of the Rockies). There's not much evidence that the market mechanism will in any way protect this resource without regulation and protection spurred by a lot of vocal activism.

You might be right. On the one hand, I believe the Net will survive both its regulators and its opponents; but without activisim in both areas, history will move a lot slower.

discuss