How We Lost The Internet

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Beck, Micah, Moore, Terry
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Beck, Micah
Moore, Terry
author_facet Beck, Micah
Moore, Terry
contents In this paper we reexamine an assumption that underpinned the development of the Internet architecture, namely that a stateless and loosely synchronous point-to-point datagram delivery service would be sufficient to meet the needs of all network applications, including those which deliver content and services to a mass audience at global scale. Such applications are inherently asynchronous and point-to-multipoint in nature. We explain how the inability of distributed systems based on this stateless datagram service to provide adequate and affordable support for them within the public (I.e., universally shared and available) network led to the development of private overlay infrastructures, specifically Content Delivery Networks and distributed Cloud data centers. We argue that the burdens imposed by reliance on these private overlays may have been an obstacle to achieving the Open Data Networking goals of early Internet advocates. The contradiction between those initial goals and the exploitative commercial imperatives of hypergiant overlay operators is offered as a possibly important reason for the negative impact of their most profitable applications (e.g., social media) and monetization strategies (e.g., targeted advertisement). We propose that one important step in resolving this contradiction may be to reconsider the adequacy Internet's stateless datagram service model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_05264
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How We Lost The Internet
Beck, Micah
Moore, Terry
Networking and Internet Architecture
In this paper we reexamine an assumption that underpinned the development of the Internet architecture, namely that a stateless and loosely synchronous point-to-point datagram delivery service would be sufficient to meet the needs of all network applications, including those which deliver content and services to a mass audience at global scale. Such applications are inherently asynchronous and point-to-multipoint in nature. We explain how the inability of distributed systems based on this stateless datagram service to provide adequate and affordable support for them within the public (I.e., universally shared and available) network led to the development of private overlay infrastructures, specifically Content Delivery Networks and distributed Cloud data centers. We argue that the burdens imposed by reliance on these private overlays may have been an obstacle to achieving the Open Data Networking goals of early Internet advocates. The contradiction between those initial goals and the exploitative commercial imperatives of hypergiant overlay operators is offered as a possibly important reason for the negative impact of their most profitable applications (e.g., social media) and monetization strategies (e.g., targeted advertisement). We propose that one important step in resolving this contradiction may be to reconsider the adequacy Internet's stateless datagram service model.
title How We Lost The Internet
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05264