[e2e] Fie on future internet

[Henning Schulzrinne]

I'll just pick up on one analogy:

"Government Governments are big and centralised. This is an inefficient way to organise what is essentially an in- formation brokering service. Perhaps the Internet and the web offer an extreme decentralisation model, with abstract interfaces and protocols that would scale gov- ernment to the small, personal level and to the large, far more effectively."

That's generally not true in countries with a federal style of government (Germany and the US are examples I'm familiar with, but there are many others). However, living in New Jersey, this has distinct downsides. In NJ, we have hundreds (566, to be precise) of tiny municipalities, each with their own school district (616 for 8 million inhabitants, i.e., smaller than NYC), police force, fire department, mayor, council, department of health and their own foreign policy. Among many problems, there is lots of duplication of effort, lots of management overhead (each school district needs a superintendent and every 25-member police force a police chief) and a lack of sufficient local expertise and media supervision.

The problem is not the routine administration of forms, records and payments, but rather decision making and avoiding "capture". New Jersey has exported many useful things, but I doubt that anybody would recommend its governance model...

Thus, I'd be rather wary of blindly trying to translate networking concepts to other domains.

For transport, modern GPS systems already provide mid-course re-routes around traffic jams, but I don't see how the BGP model would be an improvement over more centralized (if still regional) traffic information models.

Henning

On Feb 28, 2010, at 10:27 AM, Jon Crowcroft wrote:

> I spend a lot of time reviewing 
> stuff about the future internet
> then its raining on a sunday afternoon
> so i wrote down what i really think:-
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/out/fie.pdf
>