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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anything designed by committee could match the flexibility and resilience of the currently evolved system. The current internet works because its been evolving in-situ for 20 years, reacting to problems and vulnerabilities as they occur. Anything starting again from scratch would be broken at first and then also need to go through a long period of evolution.

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I think this is a really good point. Like the human body, the Internet has it's flaws but in many ways is incredibly well suited to its purpose. An interesting article (which I'm sure many have already read) which discusses how the more organic TCP/IP won out over the incredibly organised effort of OSI can be found here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet...

But the internet was designed by a comittee...and guiding its evolution as you call it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Engineering_Task_Force

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Technical_Committee

And I am sure DARPA and whomever worked on the original networking protocols would horify you by their style of design by comittee...

But are the things that actually got used and flourished the things that the committee expected?

The system hasn't evolved on it's own, like bacteria. It has changed over time due to new systems which were designed by people.

Knowing what we know now, would those designs be different? Undoubtably, yes. Would they likely be better? Likewise, yes.

Anyone who's worked with protocols knows just how bad the initial design usually is.

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