The Decommoditization of Protocols (1998) | Hacker News Reader

The Decommoditization of Protocols (1998)

levien.com

92 pointsmarttt11 comments

I appreciate the praise that TCP/IP gets in this post:

" TCP/IP is the foundation of the Internet. The protocol dates back to the early days of the ARPANet, and has existed in its present form since September 1981 (the date of RFC 791 and RFC 793). This protocol violates all of the first five principles of de-commoditization.

    It is simple. Together, the two RFCs span 130 simply formatted pages, appendices and all. This is nothing short of astonishing, considering how difficult a problem internetworking is considered to be.
    It is completely specified. IETF protocols in general are well known for specifying "bits on the wire", and these protocols exemplify IETF practice. There are no complicated options or variants. As a consequence, TCP/IP implementations tend to work together very well. (actually, you need to add a link layer to get a complete TCP/IP implementation. However, RFC 1055 describes such a link layer (SLIP) in six pages.
    It is well documented. The RFCs are a model of clarity, thanks in large part to Jon Postel.
    It is stable and mature. The protocol has been in use since 1981, and has scaled by many orders of magnitude. Old implementations still work on the modern Internet.
    It is unencumbered. No patents, copyrights, nor trademarks are infringed by a working TCP/IP implementation.

To say that TCP/IP has been enormously successful would be an understatement."

Yes, Jon Postel made the Internet's waist narrow! (according to Van Jacobsen)

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html#jon-p...

Steve Deering gave a talk on the waist in the hourglass a few years back.

https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/51/slides/plenary-1/index.h...

Yes I used one of his diagrams in the previous post:

The Internet Was Designed With a Narrow Waist https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html

Through writing that I also found that the "narrow waist" idea and metaphor comes from Postel himself (see the appendix). This doesn't seem to be widely acknowledged, and others cite various non-Postel RFCs, but it's fairly clear in Jacobsen's telling (and he was there)

I remembered that post of yours. Thanks for this.

In the spirit of the Halloween documents, Microsoft implemented and extended the Kerberos protocol.

Extended it just a tiny bit enough to be incompatible with everyone else. After getting bad PR in the media, they reluctantly agreed to publish their changes. And guess what?

... in order to get it, you have to run a Windows .exe file which forces you agree to a click-through license agreement where you agree to treat it as a trade secret, before it will give you the .pdf file

See https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and...

I have no idea why this popped up now. Overall I think it holds up reasonably well, though it's in a brasher and younger voice than I would use today. I went back and fixed the link rot.

(Incidentally, the process of updating web pages on levien.com is to log in to my Linode instance and use vim to edit the static directory. I probably should upgrade to some more modern way, at least use version control, but I do get a warm sense of nostalgia doing it this way.)

OP here. An early homepage for the (hopefully not dying) Dillo web browser provided a link to your essay (as "a MUST"): https://www.linux.ime.usp.br/~livio/dillo/new-home/Links.htm...

Dillo, too, stands for simplicity. A browser that has remained exceptionally bloat-free for 22 years.

I figured that in the light of today's heavyweight browsers, your thoughts on the simplicity of TCP/IP and HTTP/1.0 maybe resonate with many. (I'm an everyday text browser user, so both protocols are still relevant to me.)

Another interesting thing: considering the age of the Internet, it is extremely fun to find thoughtful 20+ year old essays on "computer stuff" that have stood the test of time. I'm a big fan of longer, well-articulated writings from the 90s era (a simplicity geek, I guess), and there are probably a lot of these from that period.

Thanks for writing down these thoughts in 1998. Bookmarked.

> I argue that decommoditized protocols are a very effective weapon against free software in the short term, but in the long term will help free software become more fulfilling to users.

It's not even about free software. Having proprietary standards just produces shit software. See: word, zoom. Proprietary formats are not even a thing (the idea of making some simple text documents that need a certain OS to read and write is absurd) but forced cancer that only exists because the company tries hard enough to maintain their crapware.

‘One of the most interesting things about Microsoft's Halloween Memo is the concept of "de-commoditizing" protocols’

Don't they mean monopolizing the protocols /s

that's the end goal, de-comoditization is the means to that goal.

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