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Pipes or Place
Hi Doc, 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 There are responses to this message:
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