[e2e] About the primitives and their value (was: What if there wereno well known numbers?)

[Marcus Brunner]

> Hence, IMHO, what is needed is some kind of (micro)economic 
> understanding of the different systems.  There will be at 
> least three different types of parties (senders, receivers, 
> network elements), with different interests and incentives.  
> The communication primitives, and the protocols implementing 
> the primitives, will regulate what kind of agreements the 
> parties will be able to negotiate and will affect the 
> relative negotiating power of the parties (cf. Lessig's 
> "Code".)  It would be great if we got the 
> "regulation-through-protocol-design" right enough.

Pekka,

I agree with your observation, but does this really need to be reflected
in the protocol design, isn't it more an interface to the network type
of question? I would agree that at lest some additional protocol
machinery would be required for implmenting some of the expressed
scheme.

Finally, I think it heavily depends on the applications and environment
where the differnt types of primitives are useful. I'm not sure the
"willing to offer and want to get" type of primitives  are the only
useful ones, so various flavours of those might be the right way to go
with the caveat of getting a pretty complex interface to the network.

Marcus