[e2e] traffic engineering considered harmful

[Richard Mortier]

"David P. Reed" <dpreed at reed.com> writes:

> At 05:01 PM 6/13/01 +0100, Panos GEVROS wrote:
> 
> >"David P. Reed" typed :
> >    Economic history is
> >  |littered with ventures that lost dominance because they loved control too
> >  |much.  Look at GM, Xerox, Kodak, France.
> >
> >of course this applies to endpoints and "intermediaries" alike.
> >(especially when the first dogmatically refuse to surrender -some- the 
> >control
> >(freedom of action) the posses in the original Internet architecture)
> 
> 
> If there were (or ever was) one or more "United Endpoints" that exerted 
> control, I'd be more sympathetic to this point.  But it seems like a clever 
> fallacy.  

The IETF as candidate for such a "united endpoint"? 

(Ok, so I'm trolling slightly there :-) 

On a more serious note, and I've probably just missed/forgotten this
from earlier discussions, how exactly (both as someone sitting outside
the network, and as a user of the network) should I differentiate
between an endpoint, an intermediary and a router?

> A category is quite different from an organized economic actor.
> 
> Endpoints seem to be being asked, as a class, to give up freedom of action 
> for no benefits whatsoever.  Did they do anything to harm (economically) 
> the ISPs that grew rich by making them happy?

Is that relevant?  

If the ISPs _already_ have the ability to install intermediaries,
_and_ they believe doing so will give them some form of economic
benefit, it seems entirely rational for them to go ahead and install
them.  No-one is "asking" endpoints anything (and why should they?) --
those who own the resource that the endpoints choose to buy are
administering it as they see fit, presumably to maximise their
(ie. the ISP's) benefit.