Monday, November 24, 2003
End-to-end is a BIG political statement
Martin Geddes' Telepocalypse blog points out that End-to-End is a political statement. He says that the original End-to-End paper,
In my long-held and oft-stated view, the End-to-end architecture supports:
effectively states that the users are in control . . . [but] the original paper fails to point out . . . [that] the user places value on certain features (reliable delivery of voicemail, secure file transfer). It is the economic desire that then drives the need to create an efficient architecture for their delivery.Martin is spot-on, but (abetted by Mitch Ratcliffe's comments), he gets too tangled up in subtleties and, like the Original Paper, misses the bigger point. The political statement of End-to-End is blatant (whether the O.P. said it directly or not), and powerfully more Telepocalyptic than Geddes paints.
There is a subtle difference between this and [the] pure technical efficiency argument [advanced in the Original Paper]. It says that the user should decide what the valued functionality of the system is, not the product development department of a telco or network vendor.
In my long-held and oft-stated view, the End-to-end architecture supports:
- Freedom of Speech (or expression, or communication, or . . . )
- Participatory Democracy
- Pluralism
- Diversity (freedom) of opinion, belief, activity
- Competitive markets
- Freedom to succeed or fail on merit
- Big Companies
- Big Government
- Regulation of/by/for Insiders
- Monopoly/Duopoly
- Locked-in, slow-growing, innovation-suppressing markets
- Freedom to have any color phone you want, as long as it is black
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