From the beginning, the end was the important thing. A seminal paper in the history of the Internet is End to End Arguments in System Design by Jerome Saltzer, David Reed and David Clark. This paper laid out the basic idea that the Internet should support applications running over it by not caring what applications are, in fact, running over it. This idea created the incredible diversity of services and applications reachable through the ‘Net. It also is this idea that, more than 20 years after it was first published, still scares the bejesus out of governments, carriers and some standards organizations.
The paper, often referred to as the “e2e argument,” is more than a factoid of history. It, along with David Isenberg’s The Rise of the Stupid Network, describes the key Internet feature that must be preserved for the ‘Net to continue to live up to its potential. That feature is that the Internet does not get in the way when a device at one “end” of the ‘Net wants to talk to a device at another “end.”
In too many places the installation of network address translators (NAT) and firewalls have badly distorted this feature. In an ideal e2e world, users who wanted to create a new application or service would not have to get permission from the network managers between their machine and the machines of people who wanted to use their services. But it is not an ideal world. People put in NATs to deal with real or imagined difficulties in getting address space and put in firewalls in a Band-Aid approach to security (See: Crustacean security).
Open networks scare a lot of people, not the least of whom are the carriers and governments. Carriers, because they think they need to control what their customers can get to so that the carriers can charge extra for “special” services. Governments, because they want to protect the poor users by controlling what they can do and see on the ‘Net and because governments want to watch, just in case the users do something naughty.
Some people are trying to at least get the carriers to provide an Internet service that includes all of the Internet and not just a controlled corner (See Lessig: Coalition Asks FCC to Ensure End-to-End).
One thing that had been lacking was a good, clear, well-thought-out online resource where people could learn about the importance of the e2e argument and what will happen if the e2e Internet is lost. There is now such a site that I recommend. It is called World of Ends. Please do not just take a look – take the time to read it, and you will see what the importance is of an end in the Internet world and what is at risk if the ends get captured.
Disclaimer: Some of Harvard’s schools understand clarity, some teach how not to be clear. But none cooperated in this opinion.
