Begin forwarded message:
From: Brad Templeton <btm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: May 2, 2005 5:15:20 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: mo@xxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Setting history straight: So, who really
did invent the Internet?
No, any comprehensive theory for "how the Internet came to be"
must take
into account this very fundamental decentralization and the
innovative
forces it unleashes.
Mike's right in that the invention of the internet should not
necessarily
be dated to the invention of packet switching or IP and TCP.
I personally suggest that one of the magic ingredients which made the
internet is what I call its cost contract. In other words, a billing
invention rather than a technological one.
The internet cost contract is "I pay for my line to the midpoint, you
pay for yours, and we don't account for the individual packets."
I pay my half, you pay yours.
This remarkable billing arrangement gave the illusion that the
internet
was free. People were paying for it but you could treat it like it
was
largely free. Other systems, including the X.25 network, and of
course
the PSTN, tended to have usage based accounting.
The internet grew because a flourish of people built strange and
interesting
applications, and left them open to access by the outside world. The
early days involved everything from fishtank webcams to FTP
repositories of
software to online communities talking about the technical and the
trivial.
On a network where you paid for traffic, as soon as an application got
popular, there would be a bill. And a beancounter would get the bill
and somebody would be called into an office to be asked, "Why do we
have
a huge bill for people looking at camera images of our fishtank?"
And it would have been shut down. Likewise software repositories and
much more. Only what could be demonstrably financially justified
could
have a good chance of thriving.
It is from this that msggroup, and FTP, and USENET, and archie, and
gopher
and eventually the WWW that people come to think of as "the
internet" grew.
The ability to innovate at the edges is important, but the ability to
play without accounting may have been even more important.
Who invented this? Well, some of it arose just as a product of being
a research project where accounting wasn't the main concern. Many
research projects foster innovation with this formula.
Who made it so that the model remained as the network grew to be a
going
concern? Possibly NSFNet and guys like Steve Wolfe, probably other
decisions even earlier than that.
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