[e2e] Protocols breaking the end-to-end argument

[Durga Prasad Pandey]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Richard Bennett <richard at bennett.com> wrote:

> I don't know why this question should get anybody upset, it's just a
> question about the context and motivation of the paper in the first place.
> None of the authors was part of the inner circle of the Internet protocol
> design at the time the paper was written, although Clark was either the
> Chief Architect of the Internet or on his way to becoming same. I would have
> expected Cerf and Kahn to write something explaining the architectural
> decisions they made in adapting the  framework to their system, but their
> failure to do so meant someone else had to do it. Why these three people and
> why this particular time? It's never been explained.

RB,

Is your next email going to be about(humor me..) how a secret
underground cult (now called NASA) funded a young clerk called
Einstein to produce theories of relativity so they could "stage" the
spage age and eventually perform a cultish ritual on the moon?
(Actually I could have sold this storyline to Dan Brown for gazillions
of dollars.)

You quite obviously love conspiracy theories + juicy gossip and were
probably looking for some in your first email on this thread. Now you
are going to ridiculous lengths to explain yourself.  :)

> Why these three people and why this particular time? It's never been explained.

This is a flagship question of conspiracy theorists.

You ask:

>>One of the more interesting unresolved questions about "End-to-End Args" is why it was written in the first place. Some people see it as a salvo in the ISO protocol wars, others as an attack in BBN's >>ARPANET, some as an attempt to criss the divide between engineering and policy, and there are probably other theories as well.

Conspiracy theories you mean?

One could ask these questions of almost any paper ever published. The
subtle thing they do is gently cast aspersions on the authors'
motivations. That's not a good thing to be trying to do.

The one good thing that your questions did is provoke detailed
responses from different people, some of which were very informative
to me(having been conceived well after TCP/IP, I do not have the
unique historical experience a lot of people on this list do). I liked
Dave Anderson's summary of the e2e paper too.

Durga