[e2e] New approach to diffserv...

[David P. Reed]

At 08:56 AM 6/16/2002 -0400, Melinda Shore wrote:
>At 10:45 AM 6/16/02 +0000, Sean Doran wrote:
> >I think an interesting area of research would be in analysing
> >*why* end2end models for various real-world problems have *failed*
> >to achieve the uptake enjoyed by non-end2end ("middle") solutions.
>
>That one's easy, actually.  There's an economic model underlying
>end-to-end networking that's trivially but completely incompatible
>with the way capitalism works - there's not really a good way to
>describe what's mine and what's not mine, how to account for
>resource utilization and charge for it, etc.  I do think that
>it can be mitigated and that figuring out a business model that
>accommodates policy at the edge is a really interesting project
>(for somebody else), but until that happens the people who deploy
>networks are going to continue to take the easy-to-understand
>route towards making the edges of their networks distinct and
>manageable.

Not true.   I think you'd find if the edges did a very simple thing 
(encryption of all traffic), that network owners would *have* to involve 
the edges in policy, and market forces would cause the network owners to 
seek to please customers rather than control them.

ln other words, the networks would have to "sell" policy as a benefit to 
users, rather than to enrich themselves.

And this is something the edge users can do unilaterally, for their own 
benefit.  They do need to be enabled by toolmakers, which means software 
vendors.   Microsoft *is* the problem, at least metaphorically, because 
they have stopped selling benefits to users, and started viewing the 
network owners as their customers.  (rather than the sources and sinks of 
information - the users).

Thus it isn't incompatible with market-based capitalism at all!   It is 
incompatible with monopolistic capitalism (known as feudalism 
historically), though.

It's worth noting that we had end-to-end encryption in the original 
Internet design - it was viewed by a number of us as essential in the long 
term, and we had designs and implementations ready to go in 1976-1977.

Had we not been actively blocked (and not for market-oriented reasons) from 
doing this, we would have had a much more robust and innovative platform 
today.  (and not because of imposition, but because it would have become 
part of Internet culture).