The Internet Could Be So Good

I mean, I side with you somewhat. I think most of what the internet is used for has fallen to rot & sucks, but the possibility is still there. The internet is still ready to do whatever. The web is still up for doing whatever. We aren't stuck in the current ruts of usage. There's some legalistic adversarialism thats spreading but so far the governments by & large have almost no technical say or technical voice, & ietf rfc8890 excellently describes the network operator disposition, thankfully. So yes, the series of tubes are doing fairly great.

But it still comes off to me like frustrating pedantry to try to distinguish the active uses of the internet from the network itself. The hosts & services, the clients: they are part of the network too, & the most defining part to me, given that all the amazing fantastic superb other work building transports exists merely as a utility to support use cases. What we can do here abstractly is anything, but concretely it's shaped by who else is on the network and what's available and happening; this has been a well known idea since at least the dawn of Metcalfe's Law.

I've spent a while trying to think of how to accept your rejection of users, systems, cloud providers, sites, and every thing at the end of the network, but I can't even begin to think of what we'd call the everything else that's not transport? What do we refer to everyone connected as? If you want to reserve an extremely narrow definition for a word, and reject any other usage, I think you have to have some viable usabke terms for the greater amalgamation that you are trying to "no actually" your way out of. And I don't see alternative terms for what we have.