http://mediagora.com shows how this could be done

As usual, great work, Doc and Dave. You succintly put together what the Internet is all about. Pass the cluestick!

Dave
Technorati http://www.technorati.com/
Sifry's Alerts http://www.sifry.com/alerts/

David / Doc ... cool site. Is this your new manifesto?

I wonder if there's any connection here between this and the advantage of 1-way links over 2-way links. Building a network out of 1-way links reduces co-ordination and co-ordination cost between the ends (and lower co-ordination == greater stupidity)

Perhaps keeping links 1-way is a heuristic for keeping the network stupid. That also explains why a "bit broken" is a good sign in a network. It shows that the network hasn't been trying to be too smart by policing the connections.
 
I have some thoughts on this (and comments are welcome) here :

http://www.synaesmedia.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OneWayLinks

Phil, I think you're exactly right about why one-way links matter: no permission required. And I like your point about the value of broken links, too. Thanks.

A better comparison than low-bandwidth TV, or even the telephone is the Internet as electricity. The electrical network is essentially a dumb, useless network. All of it's value is delivered by devices on the end. If those devices have interdependencies (stereo and TV) THOSE interconnections are the place to do anything proprietary (and they will tend towards open standards, like analog audio or composite video, over time).

A good place to look for some deep thinking about the internet as electrical network might be http://www.geni.org/energy/issues/overview/english/grid.html a foundation espousing Buckminster Fuller's idea of a world-wide interconnected electrical network.

The arguments for and powers against are strikingly similar (for: betterment of mankind, world-wide quality of life uplift, network effects, etc. against: politics, bureaucracy and nationalism)

Outstanding compilation re Internet as architecture and on-going agreement about protocols. But lots needs to be understood about how the agreement is realized. The devil is in the details.

A bit lost is how much effort and purpose there was in arpa, nsf and collaborating agencies, industry, universities and among individuals who got and stayed involved, to get it as right as possible. There were accidents, many hard won victories, and a fair pile or resources (public and private) expended by everyone involved.

The same sort of effort and purpose is needed to keep it right. That requires much more than individual effort at the edges. Stuff happens between the edges. Making sure the right stuff can happen is a collective enterprise. The quality of life at the edge depends on the success of that core. All the stuff you love and hate (dns, the web, messaging, AOL, Doc's and mom's blog) depend on that collective enterprise.

Chuck: Absolutely. It takes brilliance - genius, even - and persistence to build a stupid network. Never meant to imply anything other.

re: "Perhaps companies that think they can force us to listen to their messages — their banners, their interruptive graphic crawls over the pages we're trying to read — will realize that our ability to flit from site to site is built into the Web’s architecture. They might as well just put up banners that say "Hi! We don't understand the Internet. Oh, and, by the way, we hate you.""

Let me know when you have figured out how to make bandwidth and server cycles free. And/or when you have figured out a way to get people to pay for the value of content.

Until then, comments like the quote above are simply naive and serve only to weaken your other arguments through association.

And no, I'm not some corporate shill sent here to write this.

I'm just a Joe Average who understands that all of this costs money.

You want professional quality content and services?

Its going to cost money.

You want to deliver that content and those services to an ever-growing and ever-more-demanding customer base?

Its going to cost money.

Instead of continually denying this fact while bashing companies who feel threatened by the internet, why don't you take up the charge and help figure out how all of this is going to get paid for in the future.

This section starts out with the old, tired "end-to-endian" postulate, which states (without proof!) that the Internet should be "dumb." It then ends, ironically, with an example of why the Internet should be smart (routing around failures)! A blot on an otherwise excellent piece.

Joe: If you're not some corporate shill, what's your name? Doc and Dave mentioned not a few times in their book(s) that the Internet, markets, etc. are conversations.
It can be disconcerting to talk to someone when you don't know who they are.
(Of course, it is tough to post this without going into the whole anonimity vs identity debate, but I'm trying.)

Brett,

 I don't think there's a contradiction. "Stupid" here means, neutral, unbiased moving of packets which users want to move.
Not trying to "understand" what kind of packets are being moved or how to add any value other than to move them.

Actually making the packets arrive is the *only* job needed of the net. Here, a modicum of smartness is needed for the net to be a net.at all.

I have the same comment now - as I brought up at SuperNova - and I'll even bring up David Weinberger's response to me then - which I think was the right response.

1. My problem with no intelligence in the middle, is that there are a whole lot of "infrastructure" things that need to get done - to facilitate a multimedia web. By that, I mean streaming, high quality video, audio and all sorts of things - that will take full advantage of broadband (once real broadband gets here.)

Now I'm not one of those sniveling, TV over the net, keep our hands on our family jewels, kind of broadcast goons. I'm a narrowcasting kind of guy, who dreams of and who's working and building towards a day when folks can point their camcorders at the junk (that Dave Winer) recently threw into his dumpster or gave away.

It's called a garage sale by most humans, and eBay has done very well, thank you very much, enabling folks to sell their junk in a virtual garage sale - going on 24/7/365. If we could enable Joe sixpack to video his junk, he'd find somebody who'd like to buy it.

Or maybe it's called a Talk show, or garage band jam, or Bible study group, or educational lecture, or some wacky form of creative expression. Whatever it is - it's gonna be in video form and that's where the notion of a stupid Internet runs into trouble.

'Cause from the way I see it - THERE AIN'T no way of sending true, hi-res video over the net! Now I know some of you will poo-poo me and disagree and say video can be sent. I'll then retort and say there should be a class-action lawsuit around using the term "video" - 'cause the shit they're sending now ain't video! It won't play in Poughkeepsie.

Others of you will disagree with me and say "well we don't wanna send video anyway" - that's TV and we're done with that centralist control bullshit (pardon my on-going usage of French.) To that I refer above to my idealistic dreamer notions of narrowcasting versus broadcasting.

So then what's a world to do?

I say we can set up real-time bandwidth auctioning systems, to get some of the 97% of the world's fiber - in usage. But yes folks, we'll have to pay for it. It doesn't have to be a lot though! With Global Crossing going for less than $.02 on the dollar, prices are gonna come down! But we need to provide direct auctioning interfaces to humans (the customers) before we can really facilitate a videophone call or on-demand movie - which gives customers choices as to how and how much they'd like to pay ($.10 overnight, $.25 by midnight, $1.00 within an hour, $2.00 real-time - for delivery charges.)

Well Weinberger's response to me at SuperNova was as follows: "just make sure that all those servers, bandwidth auctioning systems, DNS-like people servers, whacky shared reviews, topic and conversation servers and all the other futuristic stuff you're talking about Marc - is treated just like any other dumb end-point - and we'll be fine."

But I don't see how we can pull off real-time auctioning if we treat those sort of servers as dumb end-points. I guess he was really referring to control, censorship, privacy, anti-TIA kind of things. And for that - I defer to Eric Norlin and the back-and-forth between Paul Snively and Brett Glass.

What I'm concerned with - is that we actually do need some intelligence - to enable humans to tap into the power of TRUE broadband - like a final mile connection of 5Mbps MINIMUM!

2. My second point is - that we're on the verge of a 'semantic web' (pardon my idealism again) and MAN are there gonna be some cool new ways of interacting, sharing knowledge, facilitating communication - that goes beyond what the web is today and what we can do with "linking."

I just wanna make sure we can do all that - without getting all hung up in our hyperbole and dogma. Whatever the fuck it is - it's about end-points - yes. But having some smart servers in the middle - helps.

And I guess the response from Doc and Dave Weinberger is "fine, as long as they're (the servers) no more intelligent as any of the endpoints" - and I accept that notion.

- Marc Canter

minor nit-pick, 600m=1/10, not 1/6 of the world pop.

Was it serendipity or genius to put an HTML error (http://worldofends.com/FN1 instead of http://worldofends.com/#FN1) on the footnote for "The internet is stupid"?

Footnote 1 is a bad link.
I've not tested the other footnotes.

I don't think these two statements should be next to one another...

--------
But then, as John Maynard Keynes also famously said, "In the long run, we're all dead."

We'd like to avoid the wait.
--------

There's a typo here ("they" instead of "the"): Those who provide Internet connectivity inevitably will want to provide content and services also because they connectivity itself will be too low-priced.

Routing around failures is not the Internet being "smart" in the sense that this article means, any more than it is "smart" for electrons to seek the path of lowest resistance.

For "smart" read things like "content sensitive". The behavior of the Internet core protocols and routers is the same regardless of the content being moved: be it your mother's email, some porn, your business's Web site, or a ping. TCP/IP does not ask "what is this?" or "for whom is this?" It does not have a Flash Override priority (like the telephone system does) for national defense messages. It just moves bytes.

Marc,

 I wonder if the hang up here is about *live* streaming. The net works fine for my taste in downloading audio. As bandwidth increases I have no doubt that I'll be able (with a bit of patience) to download video and other rich multimedia content too. Which might satisfy you.

The sticking point is this : if you need live streaming, you necessarily move from a packet switched net to a circuit switched one which has to maintain the state and keep connections between sender and receiver open. That will require more intelligence, and lose most of the virtues we've found in packet switching.

So, if you think we need circuit switching, WHY? What's so important about a maintained connection between sender and receiver?

I can give one example of a web site who "gets it" regarding banner ads. Television Without Pity (www.televisionwithoutpity.com) lets anyone post a banner ad in their forums for $100 a day. This has resulted in forum-dwellers chipping in to post what amount to animated bumper stickers, sometimes ideological, sometimes funny, very occasionally actually advertising something, but almost always of interest to the people reading the site. It's like having a billboard at the high school that the students take turns writing stuff on. And in the meantime, the money helps keep the site going.

I'm not sure I understand the dig at spectrum regulation. I think that just as IP is an agreement, spectrum use has to be an agreement. Otherwise our radio communication system will decay into chaos. Allowing anyone to transmit at any power on any frequency would be analogous to letting someone send random electrical pulses along ethernet cables. Luckily routers would inhibit the propagation of such signals, but the power of the transmitter limits the RF signals. That is not to say that we shouldn't have bands open that we can transmit on. I think we should open up the airwaves as much as possible, but we need to agree on a dumb protocol for that just as we needed to agree on IP for the internet.

tiny insignificant typo in penultimate sentence:

"Fortunately, the true nature of [the] Internet isn't hard to understand."

I like the double entendre of "isn't a source of programming". But will the intended audience get the subtlety of the point?

In fact: will the intended audience ever even get to see the message? What are the chances Ted Turner will ever encounter something like this? Or Michael Eisner? Or Michael Powell? Or Sonny fucking Bono?

How do we get these people to sit up and take notice?

Minor suggested amendment. I would have said:

"The way to do that is to make it easy easy easy for the networks to send and receive data [to and] from one another.

Read Howard Rheingeld's "Smart Mobs" - has a chapter about some of the newer ideas for radio broadcast and spectrum usage. Various "spread spectrum" and "wideband" or "ultrawideband" schemes make almost unlimited bandwidth and capacity available - but are achievable by means currently regulated against - i.e. lots of people broadcasting but spread over the spectrum (frequency hopping) and/or time regulated down to the billionths of a second (but across literally almost all spectrums - that's the wideband approach).

The point is almost like letting anyone send across say a fiber - but in not "random" but rather highly controlled ways - but ways that only the recievers can get.

Just FYI: I've been silent in this discussion only because I'm on airplanes all day. I probably won't be able to connect (beyond this crappy 28.8 connection through an aiport pay phone) for a few hours. Just thought I should check in...

-- David W.

Bono is dead, so he won't be getting too many Internet communiques from the digital Illuminati unless you get the Dalai Lama to consult with the dead during his next reincarnation transmigrating the Bardo planes that are in between existence. But that's a different protocol layer.

This is a key insight, one that has a Zen simplicity: the Internet is an Agreement. In other words, Internet Protocol is the digital equivalent of a gentleman's handshake, an agreement entered into based upon trust and honesty, which are principals business and government seem to have difficulty with. Once you realize you are not working with someone who will keep their word as a sacred oath of personal honor and high character, you need contracts, licenses, and non-disclosure agreements to keep everyone under control. The minute you realize that an agreement will not be maintained with a mere handshake you have lost the core agreement that is Open Source, and you sink deeper and deeper into a legal black hole, the current hell of written agreements: "Abandon hope all yee who enter here."

Although I appreciate "stupid" and "smart," I wonder if a better term would be "simple." It is the elegant simplicity of the Internet that is the central characteristic of genius in design. Buckminister Fuller, in his writings on Synergetics, speaks about nature using the path of least resistance. An open system that expresses negative entropy, one that is unlimited and healthy and can grow, will be simple (to the point of appearing stupid, but actually it is ultimately exceptionally brilliant.)

Someone needs to email this idea to Congress, because if you attempt to regulate something you are trying to own it.

So has anyone tried doing an open IM network? Isn't that what IRC is?

Congratulations! I believe you were the first one to notice this
particular typo.

-- David W.

What i noticed was interesting is that in 2 days and 20,000+ views, 32% of the browsers were identified as mozilla 5. a mere 15 less than IE6 (at 47 %). no conclusions drawn, that's what your brain is for.

Dear Davids,
About the political comments you made at The Network ParadoxThis is about politics, not just business
"In fact, the best network embodies explicit political ideals — it would be disingenuous to pretend it didn't. The best technological network is also the most open political network. The best network is ... also best at promoting a free, democratic, pluralistic, participatory society; a society in which people with new business ideas are free to fail and free to succeed in the marketplace."


I think that:
There's a lot to be further explored by you on this issue of "free, democratic etc". See a great paradox on this issue in Andrew Shapiro, "The Control Revolution", ch. 14, Push-Button Politics, where he describes ParoleWatch, a network doing justice with its own hands over the Web. I would appreciate discussing this and the need for democracy to reintroduce rules, roles and hierarchies onto the networks.

Sergio Storch
Brasil

The telephone system is dumb. It does not know who's calling whom, any more than a router knows where a particular packet is headed. It does not know where the end points of its connections are located, any more than a packet knows where its destination is. It does not know whether the analog buzz it carries is voice or any of a mind-boggling number of kinds of data. The telephone system is in fact so very dumb that it is currently allowing the very thing that sucks all the profit from the income generating items you mentioned -- that is, the internet -- to flourish over the telephone system itself.

When you get right down to it, the big difference between the telephone system and the internet is that the telephone system by default creates persistent end-to-end connections.

Via DSL,
WD Baseley

Connectivity to the Internet wants to become a commodity _utility_, like electricity, telephone, water/sewer in urban areas, etcetera. The difference is significant in that those entitities all have rich histories of public involvement in the form of tax dollars, legislation, and regulation.

There is a whole world of mistakes to be made in this regard too, most of which have also already been made in the past and therefore have the potential to be avoided. One mistake that proponents of ubiquitous connectivity must not make is to assume that there is sufficient financial incentive for some entity to build out the physical plant without some of the same kinds of assurances that the electric and telephone utilitities received.

Anyone can just as easily make the internet a worse place to live, work and raise up kids. As the internet gathers, coalesces and magnifies human energy, it does so for the bad as well as the good. I don't know exactly how you should acknowledge this simple truth, but I know I'd feel better about your piece if you did.

Bernie:

Peering agreements are contracts.

Recognizing the immeasurable good that has come from the advent of contract law in human interactions, I'm perhaps less inclined to turn my back on it. The internet's inherent simplicity should certainly allow for clarity and simplicity in those 'agreements', but let's not kid ourselves as to what they are.

Regards,
WD Baseley

Your comments about the proprietary IM protocols need to be exanded on, magnified and hardened for the (IMHO) greatest single threat to one part of the internet: Flash (TM). As Flash is pushed by Macromedia to be *the* content-delivery and web-app platform, so they squeeze out usefulness and ubiquity in favour of proprietary lock-in and future licensing timebombs.

Well, here is a suggestion:

What about creating a WoE weblog, to publish links to websites, tools and services that follow WoE's line of thinking? Ok, not only links, but also ideas for building a better World of Ends?

Aloha, amigos.
http://www.dpadua.org

Zak, the swf format has been open source for some time now. Time to get off the HTML soap box and get with the program, besides which this article is about network protocol, not plugins div.

Reconcile: The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it with the Internet is dumb; I don't think you can.

the Internet’s value is founded in its technical architecture ignores history. There were other protocol stacks kicking around in the mid-80s with superior technical architectures, such as XNS, DECNet, SNA, and ISO that never made it to world domination because they were either proprietary or created by the wrong people. The Internet's technical architecture was good enough, and accessible enough, and understandable enough to take off. But it was in no way technically better than the alternatives - in fact, IP is a significantly worse network protocol than the ISO network layer was; the proof of this is the many ISO concepts that have been incorporated into IPv6.

Thus, the Internet was designed to be the simplest conceivable way to get bits from any A to any B.

Actually, it wasn't. The simplest way to do that is to connect every A and B to a common hub and let it switch the traffic. This approach wasn't taken, despite its simplicity, because it's not robust or scalable. Packet switching is the most robust way to get bits from any A to any B, but that robustness and scalability exacts a price in complexity. It's a worthwhile price, for the most part.

The Internet is not AN agreement, it's an evolving set of agreements, represented by several thousand RFCs at this point. This is probably the weakest part of your whole argument, and the thing that makes it read like "Amish do the Net." The protocols (including IP) are under constant revision, and they will in fact continue to evolve, becoming more and more complex, and more capable of providing higher levels of serice to the programmers and normal humans who use the net. There is no good reason why every network programmer should have to write his own security module when the Net should do that sort of thing as a general service. Similarly, media services such as sequenced delivery and guaranteed rate are necessary for media applications and can't be provided in the end points no matter how hard the programmer tries. These need to be done by the Net itself.

At the physical level, the Internet is actually an overlay on the phone network, not a separate thing.

Entrepeneurs and network engineers are not going to freeze the Internet at the horse-and-buggy stage where it is right now it will continue to develop. Don't fear progress - it will set you free.

The Internet is an overlay on the phone system, for the most part, and it knows just as much about the packets flowing through it as the phone network - source and desination addresses, sequence numbers, checksums, and priorities. So you set up a false dichotomy.

The Internet needs to become as transparent as the phone network, meaning it needs to understand sequences and tempo. Smart vs. dumb really has nothing to do with it.

It sounds screwy because it is screwy. The Internet has always assigned priority to the traffic it needs to run itself - ICMP and routing table updates - over user data, and it's always had a way to push some application data to the head of the queue over other application data (the urgent data flag).

The Internet has always been capable of supporting multiple applications, and has always tried to harmonize them with each other despite the fact that they have different needs. Telnet, for example, needs quick response, but it uses short packets so it's not a sacrifice to give them priority over stuff like Usenet that's not time critical. Similarly, web surfing needs priority over e-mail. That's not too hard to understand.

Priority is a matter of application requirements, and your quaint dogma on this matter detracts from your credibility.

The Internet's value grows all over, not just at the edges. Interior pipes that can route data faster and more reliably are extremely valuable, and the pipes we have nowadays are much better than the 56KBps leased lines used in the early days.

The Internet is smart when it comes to running itself, and it has to be. The Internet also provides services to applications that they could do on their own, such as TCPs reliable delivery and the whole DNS thing.

You can add value anywhere on the net, because "anyone can improve it", remember?

Commodities are a business, but not a good one.

To be specific: Those who provide Internet connectivity inevitably will want to provide content and services also because they connectivity itself will be too low-priced.

Then provide them with a way to make a reasonable return from connectivity, by increasing the intelligence of the Net enough to support bandwidth-on-demand for applications that require it.

You can't put the squeeze on the telcos forever, and right now the Internet is getting a subsidized ride from phone customers. This isn't right, and it's retarding last-mile broadband.

To connect to the Internet is to agree to grow value on its edges.

So I can't use the Internet if I don't swear allegiance to your religion? Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. I can connect to the Internet simply to enjoy what's there, even though this doesn't add value. And a number of people are free to agree to add value to the core if they want, as they have done time and time again.

You can add value anywhere, and that, my friends, is the Real History of the Internet.

You left out the most important one: "If want to play, you've got to pay". None of this is free, and it never will be.

Nobody owns the air, but that doesn't stop Congress (and Kyoto Protocol signatories) from regulating what we can and can't pump into it.

Why should the Internet be any different?

The Internet was built to include everyone on the planet.

Then why aren't there enough IP addresses for everybody to have one?

The creators of these services didn’t simply come up with end-based applications, and they sure didn’t tinker with the Internet protocol itself.

Actually, the IP was created after e-mail, ftp, and telnet were specified, and it was built to support the requirements of those applications. As people have desired to use applications that IP couldn't support, IP was enhanced repeatedly to support them.

Why do you think we're on IP version 6 already?

The Internet isn't a single, static agreement, it's an evolving set of agreements, and the telcos and Hollywood have every bit as much a legitimate stake in seeking to enhance those agreements as you and I do. This is what democracy is all about, not demonizing the other by calling him a "BigCo" or some such clap-trap.

If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?

One reason: because so many people who don't understand it have tried to explain it to others who don't understand it. Want an example?

In fact, they maybe could see that having a system that transports all bits equally, without government or industry censorship, is the single most powerful force for democracy and open markets in history.

Yawn. Do we have a postal system that transports all letters and packages equally, or do we have one that gives people choices about how fast they need their packages delivered vs. much much they're willing to pay? Do we have bookstores that sell all books equally, without regard to the wishes of their writers, publishers, or readers?

Then why should we hamstring the Internet somewhere in the 1980s in order to make it a better metaphor for our political ideas?

The Internet is product, a network, a pay service, and it's built on choices; it's not a symbol or a metaphor for Hippie Commune Life, and your dogmatic vision is not going to be accepted by policy makers, nor should it be.

This is reality.

wrt /m42: I don't see anything to reconcile. We are using "stupid" (not "dumb") in Isenberg's sense: http://isen.com/stupid.html. We obviously haven't made "stupid" clear enough.

Richard (/m43), as with many of your following comments, you're mistaking this article for a technical explanation of the Internet. So, yes, of course there are important conditions that would have to be added to this statement to make it accurate enough to pass as a tech explanation. But that's not why we wrote "WoE." If it were presented as a technical piece, I'd certainly admit that it over-simplifies. But, given who it's aimed at, I hope that it instead clarifies.

"Stupid Network" is the wrong name to call the Internet, and there's nothing brilliant about Isenberg's paper.

The thang about the Internet that Isenberg misses is that the difference between the Internet the phone network isn't nearly as vast as the differences between the machines connected to the networks. The phone company's "Smart Network" is a way to offer more valuable services to people with dumb machines, like phones. The Internet is also a Smart Network, but it's a smart network for smart devices. Thus, when the intelligence of the network is combined with the intelligence of the computer, whole new vistas open up that go far beyond what we can imagine today.

It seems to me that you're just as much stuck in tunnel vision as the phone companies and record companies you're attacking.

I fail to see how misrepresenting and distorting the nature of the Internet is going to help anyone understand it.

The opposition of the Internet to the phone net is completely false, because the Internet is an overlay on the phone network that can't work without it. Telco execs understand this, and it's a meaningless distinction to the record company and media folks who don't have any stake in the phone net whatsover.

The thing that you need to emphasize about the Internet if you want to clarify and enlighten is the cooperative nature of Internet intelligence - both with the user and with the telco net - and the vast new vistas of applications that are possible given the intelligence of the machines connected to the Internet.

Because you've declined to deal with specifics and instead offer up a sweeping set of metaphors that are dubiously accurate at best, I'm afraid that you've muddied the waters more than clarified the issues.

But lots of people like what you've written, whether it's accurate and meaningful or not. So that's something.

It seems that your message is that lawmakers can't mess with the Internet without breaking it. If this were in fact true, I don't think it would discourage them from tinkering, and would probably do the opposite.

Major nit-pick ... how much effort has gone into making the most of affordable tech? I just upgraded my old box to '98, and my less-old box to ME. In the process I took advantage of RealAudio's "benevolence" and upgraded to RealOne. What a piece of bloat-ware /that/ is! Within an hour I had searched out and re-installed RealPlayer 8. This reminds me of the early days (less than 10 years ago) where some of us were dragging our heels insisting that web pages should be backwards compatible for text-only viewing. Now it's as though safe to assume that everyone is running 1GHz and broadband ... or, significantly, anyone who /matters/ is running 1 GHz and broadband.
Experience isn't just a collection of memories; experience conditons how we view the world and the rest of the people in it. (If you own a regrigerator, you're in the richest quarter of the species.)

**The ends may be the means, but the ISPs are keeping tabs on what connections the ends are making.
**Today, 11 March 2003, the Government in the U.K. announced that a restricted list of bureaucracies, including the Security Services,Police and Fire Service (so they can find out who is making hoax calls!) will have access to ISP data.
**Are ISPs ends?

I am currently out of the office with limited access to email.

If your message is urgent, you can usually reach me on my cell phone at 416.723.3719.

Thanks and regards,

Michael O'Connor Clarke
Senior Vice President | Weber Shandwick Worldwide
t: 416.964.6444 x459 | c: 416.723.3719 |
http://www.webershandwick.com

Oops. Don't you wish Outlook was smart enough not to do this kind of thing /without/ being told?

Doh is me. Sorry everyone.

Michael
< replied-to message removed by QT >

money is an agreement! "if only everyone agreed, it could all be arranged at once." -- dostoevsky, dream of a ridiculous man :D

"Stupid" carries too much emotional and connotational baggage that a word like "simple" doesn't.

The article was, in a word, outstanding! Keep up the good work guys. I especially like reading how such openess and freedom is contrasted with the mindsets of both Government and Business. In my opinion, too many people are blind to the basic reality that Government is the *ENEMY* of freedom -- not the friend that some like to portray it as.

The incumbent providers of networking services — Hint: It begins with "tele" and ends with "com" — could accept that the stupid network is going to swallow their smart network. They could bite the bullet now rather than running up hundreds of billions of dollars in costs delaying and fighting the inevitable.

They could also do society a great service by selling full intenet access, instead of using their monolopy power to force the current crop of 'download only' services down our throats. Communities which have full Internet service are technologically enabled and economically advantaged, the new crop of small businesses can thrive there. Communities with crippled Internet services are hobbled and will wither in the long run.

I appreciate this article - there are so many examples of the points that were made - that it would fill pages. Thanks for your insights.

Another way to say this is that the Internet is a standard, or that the Internet is platform. Like money, like language, like contractural relationships, or like the rules of the road that control how we driving on our highways - all these agreements lower the transaction costs for exchange to take place. That lowered transaction cost enables resources to shifted to more interesting things. Drawing attention to "agreement" nature of the net is very nice because it focuses the mind on how that agreement emerges, evolves, and is governed.

The aggregate of rocks metaphore is very thought provoking.

When ever your designing a way to make transactions more efficent - i.e. creating a standard, a markeplace, a hub, etc. - you make tradeoffs between the scale advantages of a single hub; v.s. the maliablity of a more loosely coupled design. Standards (interoperablity, etc.) let can let you get a little of both - the scale effect of uniformity with the letting go of spreading it out more thinly over the landscape.

The networks that arise on top of the standards are not uniformly distributed; they will have places where things condense into concentrations. We can see that in the routing maps of the net; or in the traffic patterns of web site popularity. These are power-law distributions - usually very inequitable.

I love the aggregate of dirt metaphore because the distribution of
earthquakes is power-law distributed as well. Hotel California!

The internet does not stand on the phone system.

Transaction standards, like the Internet "agreement", are like bridges across a river. They allow two parties to efficently transact over the standard (or bridge). The two parties always have numerous choices about how to do that; they can take swim, take a boat, fly, walk down river to the shallows. A dominate standard, like a bridge over the Mississippi tends to grow strong because lots of parties begin to transact over it. This creates complementing goods around the bridge heads and these make it even more attractive to travel over that bridge. This is one manifestation of what economists call network-effect.

The phone network is just such a bridge - lots of traffic flows over it, lots of complementary products all around it.

Now time passes and another standard, another bridge appears. People compair and contrast it with the old bridge. People building it do too. They mimic it. They make lists of all the things around the old bridge and they use that list for ideas about what to build out around the new bridge. But the new bridge is not the old bridge.

In the Internet/Phone network example the new bridge borrowed lots of things from the old bridge. Bandwidth services, wires, even Unix. But it was, even at the beginning a new bridge - Ethernet, wireless, packets moving over microwave and dry wire links. It was always a new bridge because packet switching is a very diffferent approach from connection switching.

There are huge competitive forces at work between cities that now cluster around these old and new bridges. Pretending that one of these cities is somehow inside the other is a mistake. Sure they both cross the Mississippi, maybe.

I'd have to take issue with "stupid", as Bernie Dunham says, "simple" would be a better description, and a totally different one. As we all know, especially in technology, simplicity very hard to achieve, and represents a great achievement of the designers of the Internet.

As WD Baseley said, the prime feature of the Internet is that the IP protocol is connectionless. However, a connection has to be established to do anything, like transmit a file; it's just that the connection is broken as soon as the file is transmitted (but before the Internet session is ended). It would be possible to implement a telephone system, which used a connectionless protocol; in fact, it's already been done. I'd suggest the most important feature of the Internet is not in the detail of the technology, however clever, but that nobody owns it, so no one can control it. This is without precedent in communications media.

As we noted in the article, we took "stupid" from David Isenberg. But we took it because we like it. "Simple" is good, too, but it doesn't hit readers over the head the way "stupid" does.

And, yes, John, I agree: The fact that the Net is unowned is crucial. You could re-write World of Ends with that as the starting point. But we wanted to anchor the case in the Net's architecture, not its economics. Again, that was for writer-ly reasons.

There is a russian translation of this great manifest: http://www.ibusiness.ru/marcet/tele/25612/.

Personally, I have always thought the most appropriate metaphor for the Internet is the highway network. The road itself is not the value, it is inherently routable, and the value of it comes in what is enabled at the ends of it.

Think about it.

This is the best overview of the "net" that I have seen. It is so well written, that I read it all the way through and enjoyed every 'bit' of information.

Nice work!

Somebody's blog today questioned the truth of this article, given the new media ownership rules:
http://zeitblog.zeitgeist.com:8668//space/2003-06-03

Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between.

I think we need to be careful not to confuse what is, with what we feel should be true. The vision of a net as an open sphere whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is nowhere is true as far as it goes but neglects to address how anybody pays the rent.

The Zeitgeist blog tells me not to confuse what's true, with what we are afraid is true, what we don't want. The nightmare of corporate control and the end of the party, as the 60s ended may also be true, but the net was always governed by its cultural context and human limits.

We can't lose what we never had. And while we were having conversations, we missed the opportunity to engage with the majority. So the majority doesn't care if corporations kick over our sand castles.

We still have mail, html, encryption, blogs... and we are a self-selected elite that participates in these things...democracy doesn't allow every degree of freedom; nor does the chaos of the universe allow more than a certain amount of tyranny.

I ask the same old question: How do we pay the rent? Not with philosophy.

-MG

Philosophizing about the Internet is perfectly fine and good, but if it's not informed by an understanding of how the Internet works and what its shortcomings and possibilities are, it won't be very useful.

The "World of Ends" misses the mark because it erects a monument to certain aspects of the Internet's design that were merely pragmatic compromises once upon a time and are no longer productive.

But that's largely because Doc and Dave aren't engineers and they don't know how the process of network engineering actually works. They tend to make pretty good guesses most of the time, but this time they're off.

 Dear Friends: Greetings: I am a retired attorney. A few years ago a man came to me with a letter. He asked me to verify the fact that this was legal to do. I told him I would review it and get back to him. When I first read the letter my client brought me, I thought it was some “off-the-wall” idea to make money. A week and a half later we met in my office to discuss the issue. I told him the letter he originally brought me was not 100% legal. My client then asked me to alter it to make it perfectly legal. I asked him to make one small change in the letter. I was still curious about the letter, so he explained to me how it works. I thought it seemed like a long shot, so I decided against participating. But before my client left, I asked him to keep me updated on his results. About two months later, he called me to tell me he had received over $800,000 in cash. I didn’t believe him, so he asked me to try this idea and find out for myself. I thought about it for a couple of days and decided I really didn’t have anything to lose, so I asked him for a copy of the letters. I followed the instructions exactly, mailed 200 copies, and sure enough, the money started coming in! It arrived slowly at first, but coming. I kept a precise record of the earnings, and in the end, it totaled $978,493! I could hardly believe it. I met with my friend for lunch to find out exactly how it worked. He told me there are quite a few similar letters around, but this one is different because there are six names at the end of the letter, not five like some others. This fact alone results in your name being in far more returns. The other fact was the help I gave him, making sure the whole thing was legal, since no one wants to take the risk of doing something illegal.

 By now you are surely curious to know what small changes to make. If you sent a letter like this one out, in order to be completely legal, you must actually sell something in order to receive a dollar in return. So when you send a dollar to each of the names on the list, you must include these words, “PLEASE PUT ME ON YOUR MAILING LIST” and include your name and address. This is the key to the program. The item you will receive for the dollar you sent to the six people below is the letter.

 At the time I first tried this idea, I was earning a good living as a lawyer. But everyone in the legal profession will tell you there is a lot of stress that comes with the job. I told myself if things worked out, I would retired from my practice and play golf. I decided to try the letter again, but this time I sent 500 copies. Three months later , I had totaled $2,341,178!

 Here are a few reasons a person might give for not trying this program: Ø Some people think they can never make a lot of money with anything this simple. Ø Some are afraid they will be ridiculed for trying Ø Some dream of large sums of money, but do nothing to actually achieve it. Ø Some are just plain lazy. Ø Some are afraid of losing their investment. They think this program is designed to beat them out of a few dollars.

 The system works if you will just try it. But you must follow the simple instructions exactly, and in less than three months, you will receive $800,000 GUARANTEED! Keep what you are doing to yourself for awhile. Many will tell you it won`t work and will try to talk you out of your dreams. Let them know of your success after it works.
LETTERS FROM PARTICIPANTS IN THIS PROGRAM:
 
 My name is David Rhodes. In 1992 my car was repossessed and bill collectors were housing my. I was laid off and my unemployment ran out. In October of 1992, I received a letter telling me how to earn $800,000 anytime I wanted. Of course, I was skeptical. But because I was so desperate and virtually had nothing to lose, I gave it a try. In January 1993, my family and I went on a 10-day cruise. The next month I bought a brand new Mercedes with cash! I am currently building a home in Virginia and I will never have to work again. This money program really works perfectly every time. I have never failed to receive less than $500,000. This is a legitimate, money-making opportunity. It does not require you to sell anything or to come in contact with people. And , best of all, you only leave the house to mail the letters. If you have always believed that someday you would get the lucky break, then simply follow the instructions and make dreams come true.

 Larry McMahon, Norfolk, VA Six months ago, I received this letter and ignored it. Five more came within a period of time and I ignored them also. I was tempted, but I was convinced that they were just a Hoax. After three weeks of deliberating, I decided to give it a try ( not expecting much ). Two weeks went by and nothing happened. The fourth week was unbelievable! I caint say I received $800,000 but I received $400,000. For the first time in years, I am debt free. I am doing this again, only this time starting with 500 post. I strongly recommend that you follow the instructions exactly as outlined in this letter.

 INSTRUCTIONS 1. Immediately send $1.00 to each of the six people on the list at the end of this letter. Wrap the dollar bill in a note saying “ Please add me to your mailing list” and include your name and address.
 2. Remove the name next to the #1 on the list and move the rest of the names up one position (#2 becomes #1, #3 becomes #2, etc…..) Then place your name in the #6 position.
 3. When you have completed the instructions, take this letter and copy it,then go to (Google,Yahoo,...) and type in (Making Money Massege board,or post massege,...)and start posting your copy to 200 massege boards,or more this is only the mini you can post as much as you like...The more copies you send the better the results. Keep a copy of this letter so you can use it a second time. Post it out again in six months, but Post it with the addresses you receive with each dollar. It will work better the second time. NOTE: This service is 100% legal - (Refer to title 18 section 1302 of the U.S. Postal & lottery laws)
 How does it work? When you send out 200 Posts, it is estimated that at least 15 people will respond and send you a $1.00. ($15.00) Those 15 will Post 200 Posts each and 225 people send you $1.00 ($225.00) Those 225 people Post 200 Posts each and 3,375 people send you $1.00 ($3,375.00) Those 3,375 post 200 posts each and 759,375 people send you $1.00 ($759,375.00) At this point your name drops off the list, but so far you have received $813,615.00. P.S. When your money begins to come in, give the first 10% to charity with spirit and share a good fortune!


1. vicman Garcialepe
   6713 Pickering Ave Apt "C" whittier, CA zip 90601

2. Justin Hutchings.
   P.O. Box 242
   Hawkinsville Ga, 31036

3. A.J. Kaquatosh
   P.O. Box 577
   Keshena, WI 54135

4. Steven
   1614-377 Ridelle Ave.
   Toronto M6B1K2
   Canada

5. T.T.T.Y.B
   14 PRICE TERRACE
   HAMILTON 2271
   MATAMATA

6. Radwan Hammoud
   P.o.BOX 289
   DR.Nazih Bizri Blvd.
   Saida - Lebanon Middel East

This realy realy works,i tried it once and i'm doing it again,first to be honest i only posted 145 posts and i didn't recive alot only 6,689.00$ in 3 months,at least this means that it realy works ,so this time i'm posting 604 posts and i've got so far in 2 month 15,640.00$ this is realy like a dream come true.so go on and try it trust me you've got nothing to lose....

important tip - Cover money by paper fully by which it can not been seen in light , because postal employees do some cheat some times....ok

Richard, you are clearly missing the point. Merely connecting to the Internet you are adding to/growing the value on its edges. Whether or not you know you are binding yourself to a social contract does not matter. Can we remove value from the network by connecting ourselves to it? Even malicious actions could be considered 'happy crimes' in that they increase knowledge and possibly have economic benefits that result from the development of more robust infrastructure. We have to talk about edges here because we are talking about connecting to the Internet and not building the network.

Nice article, on the whole, but why is it formatted to consume no more than one third of my screen? It's quite annoying to read it in a narrow strip like that.

I really enjoyed the document, but I also wish that authors would stop lumping ALL businesses and ALL governments into the 'clueless reactionary' category. Not all business is like the RIAA.

Business simply plays by a set of rules society sets, if society doesn't like the results, it should change the rules. To paraphase: people get the government and businesses they deserve.

Andy

Do we have bookstores that sell all books equally, without regard to the wishes of their writers, publishers, or readers?



We have some bookstores that do as you suggest. Most of the chains push books primarily on the say so of their publishers - mainly the big media chains. Radio stations are an even less even playing field. That which can be counted easily can be more easily controlled.

To me this entire document reads like someone pleading "Can't we be reasonable about this". Never, never underestimate the ability of governments to legislate.

Never trust a grand strategist, nor an argument based on ideas of historical inevitability. The thing the two things have in common is that they both fail.

"as simple as gravity in the real world" may not be the best analogy.

Gravity is described by general relativity on a macroscopic scale and as far as I know not understood at all on a microscopic scale.

In fact, they maybe could see that having a system that transports all bits equally, without government or industry censorship, is the single most powerful force for democracy and open markets in history.

Open market and democracy are disturbuting power. The problem is that those already in power possitions don't want a real democracy (direct voting?) or real open markets (many markets are actually closed ones, the music & movies are just common examples of such). You are asking them to share their power, why do you think they'll do that?

That was just awesome!

I think that was the first web page I've seen in years without corporate logo and banner feces smeared all over it.

Well written, well thought out.

Good job.

While Kudos are in order once again for D and D collaborating on yet another document that history will record as a timeline event.

 I felt a sense of something missing and on rereading it came to me, nowhere do we talk about responsibility in the aspect of use.

 I am not talking about censorship or content or
cracking or spam/scams. Just plain old personal responsibity as an end user of the internet.

If a larger percentage of net users could just simply understand that with use comes responbility, as an end
of end, participants must be taught that there are responsibilies
to other ends of ends.

The implicit agreement of use of the Internet over time
must grow to and from a basic understanding of not just what the Internet is, but how one takes responsibilty for its health and well being, by understanding the personal responsibilty entailed in keeping ones connected systems or devices free from the ability to propagate the bad stuff that affects us all, viri, spam relays, etc ad nuaseum.

I tend to take a long range historical approach to most things and as a species we take our sweet time to actually
inbed anything on a globally consious level.

Lets explore the only three major species wide gains we have made, that although not yet complete and universal are becomming inbedded as education levels rise and global thought patterns adjust species wide.

The abolisment of slavery, well we have had a couple of hundred years to start to get our heads around this one
and for the most part even though slavery exists in many forms and places still, youre pretty hard pressed to see it enshrined
in constitional documents. A couple of hundred more years
we might see it eradicated..

The emmanciptaion and equality of women..again this is still in its early days, but I think globaly outside of a few religions and cultural case specific areas,It would be now generally accepted that women are no longer chattel or some how inferior to men.

A general awareness of planet earth, enviromental issues
are definately the new kid on the block and there uptake
does prove that we can grasp new concepts on a global scale
wether we chose to do anything about them..well the jury is still out and isnt comming back in anytime soon, barring a few global scale disasters, we probaly need a few more generations for any meaning full species wide understanding
of enviromental issues.

So there we have it for all our pretentions and history
to me the above three issues pretty well sum up all of our species accomplishments, everything else is isolated incidences of hope and despair.

So then we come back to the Internet and draw a loose paralel,

As an end of ends and as system for human knowledge tranference, this thing we call the Internet is by far our
greatest achievement yet.It can and does at its very least perhaps ramp up the speed of knowledge tranference.
I know it doesnt mean much yet to the billions who dont have access yet and maybe never will, but it does allow those of us who are connected in a manner never before acheived to begin to explore its potentialities.

Its chances of long term success and survival are indeed threatened by the same sort of basic specicies wide issues
as I am attempting to illustrate.

Slavery at is basis is power and controll, attempts at controll of the Internet by state or coporate state are nothing more than
the last ditch attemps of the same mindset that keeps
Slavery alive and well.

The fundemental notions of "ism's" have been at the heart
of all forms of discrimination and socail determinates
the Internet cares little for that and has for the first time allowed its conected portions of the human species to
interconnect with out fear of care of socail determinates

The enviroment of the Internet will only probably only survive as a true end of ends and like the enviromental
issues notion,if we collectively can come to an agreed understanding of what it is and again Doc and David
have hopefully raised that that awareness again.

The personal responsibility of use again like the real world
environment that the Internet perhaps mirrors would be well served if many of us quit deficating in water we all drink.
wether intentionaly or other wise.

So Doc and David maybe a few sentences on personal responsibity of the use of the Internet is complimentary
to other view pionts expressed in this document and would
help explain the what it is and isnt part.

great work again guys
michael at canopener.ca

How do we handle such items as ICANN and NetSol in regards to this subject?

These two groups seem to hold a significant amount of sway in how the internet works.

Now I realize that this is only in terms of the DNS system but for the majority of that 600,000,000 that are on the internet I am hazarding a guess that they use a browser to get around.

The DNS seems to be a perplexing concept of the Internet as you have to purchase a domain in order to participate. The industry surrounding this system is quite remarkable and does not get much attention other than to criticize ICANN or NetSol. I am interested to hear what people have to say about the registrars and the direct and reseller markets cropping up arond them.

Internet has merged the world togather. People across the countless boundaries have come much closer. The instant speed of email has left behind all the conventional communication channels like post or telegram which are now often termed as snail-mails. The induction of new technology in web designing and devlopement will revolutionize internet further.

Electronic slavery.Every new dettection equipment,all the sleazeball jews,hindus and other assorted trash from the NYC government.THEY SUCK.

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I think if you were going to Write a book you would go a bout it much more carefully.

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i agree!!


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good topic!!!!

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"What makes the Net inter is the fact that it's just a protocol — the Internet Protocol, to be exact."

Isn't it "inter" because its an interconnected network?
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.

Takayuki (/m109), yes, the "inter" is there because the Internet is a network of networks. But it's a network of networks because there's a protocol that allows networks to interoperate.

Some very cool insights... thankyou, from (me) - one of the 'end' points working on propagating a beautiful viral flower species, which hopefully will come to your attention in due course...

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