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Comment by syn0byte | Hacker News Reader

There is this preoccupation in these documents with "applications" and "services" being an important part of the design of a network. I find it wrong to the point of troubling. Although granted I say this now only with the power of hind-sight.

With the power of hind-sight; Imagine an internet where Comcast, AT&T, et al, have such granular control over access to your infrastructure. Ala Cart billing based on each addressable service you happen to run for example. DNS hijacking on steroids as another. The development of new protocols for all but biggest "participating" organizations would be stillborn. Capitalism would have strangled the Internet baby in the crib long ago if we had "done it right."

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and these are some of the best intentions.

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>Imagine an internet where Comcast, AT&T, et al, have such granular control over access to your infrastructure

They already do, tho, we call it port filtering & deep package inspection, and when they do that, people get mighty angry. ;)

Also, you seem to implicitly assume that they'd have come to gain as much power as they have now, but that seems doubtful, given how different this would work.

Also, I think you (unintentionally!) attack a strawman there - the point here consists more of matters like congestion control.

Besides:

I said what I said about hoping for cooperation between RINA & GNUnet for a reason:

RINA lacks the anti-censorship mechanisms of GNUnet, while GNUnet lacks some of the insights from RINA research.

And those anti-censorship mechanisms would make your point entirely moot.

You're probably right about the straw man, but I wasn't trying to make an argument against better models. Just rationalizing why what we got ain't so bad after all.

Yes, they do all that now but it's kludgy, easy to detect, and a much more obvious overreach of their presumed authority. See Comcast/Sandvine fiasco.

As to the implicit assumption of the Telco's powers under such a system. History is my biggest "proof". It's a reasonable assumption given economic and games theory. At best it wouldn't have been the Telco's directly that ended up with the control. Someone would have and the result would still be the same.

How about this: How many terrible government regulations about filtering and censorship that are technologically infeasible with the current internet been not only technically possible, but fully fledged features of an objectively better design?

Again I'm not arguing against research and better designs, just rationalizing what we got.

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