connectivity issues

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

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| Your analogies are flawed.  Receiving phone calls and snail mail are
| essentially an unlimited part of the service, but making calls
| (especially long distance) and sending mail cost a premium.  Are you
| suggesting that we protest to get free long distance calls too?

I'm not sure how to reply to this, since I don't have  a  clue  about
what  "essentially an unlimited part of the service" might mean.  You
certainly don't mean that making calls (long distance  or  local)  or
sending  mail  are  free.  They're obviously not; you pay for both of
them.  In the case of phone service, this usually  includes  a  fixed
monthly  "rental" charge for local calls, but it's not free.  They do
call local service "unlimited", but in fact if you start  using  your
line  24  hours  per  day  (to  an  ISP  or  with  a demon dialer for
instance), you will find the phone company insisting that you  change
your service to one that costs a lot more.

I'd think the analogy is pretty direct.  Telephone service is used to
make a call from one telephone (number) to another.  In all but a few
very special cases, such calls can be made from any telephone to  any
other.   It's  true  that you may be charged more for some calls than
others, but costs aren't relevant to the analogy.  The point is  that
when  you  ask a phone company for phone service, they *never* try to
insist that you can only make outgoing calls.  You  have  to  request
this  as  a  special service.  By default, telephones accept incoming
calls from anyone.

Similarly, it takes very special circumstances  (and  usually  either
suspicious behavior or a court order) for the postal system to refuse
mail to or from anyone.  Mail carriers will generally accept  letters
from  anyone,  no  questions  asked,  if  they  have  the appropriate
postage.  The only usual limit is the reasonable one of how much  the
carrier can carry.  If you want to send a 5-pound package, you should
probably expect to take it  to  the  post  office.   But  this  isn't
relevant  to the analogy.  The postal system's default behavior is to
accept mail from anyone and deliver it  to  anyone.   A  "send  only"
postal   service   is  almost  unknown,  and  would  require  special
arrangements with the local post office.

In the case of the postal system, there are cases  where  the  system
won't  deliver.   But  it's always because the recipient is in a very
remote location, and for a price, they'll be happy to deliver. So the
analogy  is still pretty direct.  If the post office provides service
at all, it is two-way by default.

The design of the Internet was very similar to this. An Internet host
accepts packets from clients (processes) and attempts to deliver them
to other clients.  As with the phone and postal systems,  any  client
can send and receive.  In fact, bidirectional exchange is the norm in
all three systems.  Exchange in the postal system is many  orders  of
magnitude  slower, of course, but this has been the norm since postal
systems were started.  The phone system has always been  based  on  a
"connection" model, and exchange has always been the norm. IP is more
like the postal system, connectionless, but connections were built on
it from the start and have been the norm from the start.  (We do have
things like NFS and SNMP that are connectionless, but they are really
examples of packages that implement their own sort of connection.)

The commercial idea that the Internet is a new sort of TV really is a
major  distortion of its design and intended use.  And it puts a real
damper on how people can use it.  This also  results  in  some  major
inefficiencies.   We  have  a lot of users now who are getting things
like digital cameras (still and video).  Many of them think that  the
only way to get such things to friends is as attachments to email. So
they attach the file, and send it to N friends or ralatives,  loading
the  network  with  N  copies of the same data at the same time.  The
right way to do this is to include the  URL  pointing  to  your  home
machine.  Then others can download it when and if they like.

To do this, of course, that you need to have a  web  server  on  your
machine.   All  systems, even W98, now come with web servers.  In the
long run, this will be a normal part of  every  computer,  and  users
will  get  used  to  the  idea that they can just drop files into the
server's directories to make them available to others (with  maybe  a
short message to tell friends about the new files).  But in the short
term, we have the problem that the commercial guys don't want you  to
do  this.   This is potentially of such value that we should be doing
everything we can to make sure that ISPs allow it.

We do have the problem that they are usually big, powerful companies,
and we don't have the clout.

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