[e2e] a means to an end

[Scott Brim]

Excerpts from David P. Reed at 07:31:00 -0500 on Sun  9 Nov 2008:
> Riffing on Pekka's opening - why not multiple competing "routing" 
> layers?

Yes, you can run multiple ships-in-the-night "networks" over a single
underlying "layer network", but how do the endpoints know what they
can even try to reach?  One way of doing that is to have a common
internetworking layer -- call it the Internet.  Another is to have the
endpoints know how to search according to the protocols they can speak
and networks they are connected to (but only those).  This means smart
endpoints and difficult customer support.  I predict that if you ran
this experiment, everyone would converge to a single "network" after
all.  

> In the old days, when the Internet was about tying together 
> different pre-existing networks into a coherent whole, it *was* one of 
> many.  (at least one other routing mechanism existed - uucp -- and it 
> used some of the same pre-existing networks).

UUCP had totally different syntax and the protocols to use were (are)
implicit in the addressing.