[e2e] It's all my fault

[John Wroclawski]

At 3:38 PM -0700 5/16/07, Vadim Antonov wrote:
>On Wed, 16 May 2007, Ken Calvert wrote:
>
>>  You are right, one can contemplate.  But as soon as one
>>  starts talking about it, lots of folks with a firm grasp of
>>  the status quo start saying it'll never work, there's no
>>  market for it, etc.
>
>Here you see the division between engineers who design and build things
>which make economic sense and academics who think of pure Platonic
>technology existing in economic vacuum.

Vadim,

This and your previous notes miss the point.

The people mentioned in this conversation who are proposing 
user-driven path selection models are, as a general rule, also 
proposing that the providers benefit when they are selected - ie, 
some economic or payment mechanism.

The reason a provider might appreciate this is precisely to get 
*away* from the commodity business that packet delivery (to use your 
words) is today. If there is no technical mechanism for attracting 
users with enhanced service and receiving a benefit for doing so, 
there is no hope of being anything other than a commodity. If there 
is, there is.

The fact that the current Internet design largely decouples many 
providers from their ultimate customers, economically and 
technically, is both a strength and a weakness. What it is not is the 
only possible, or economically astute, answer.

Cheers,
John