4 ms·

"That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973

"That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977), TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999)." Yeah, no one uses TCP/IP, DNS or SMTP nowadays. Good thing that we have gotted rid of those antiquated protocols and instead can use facebook and whatsapp! </sarcasm>

coldtea 8y ago
Why the sarcasm? It's true that (almost) no one uses them. Or, rather, no one much cares about them, and when they do use them, it's proxied and controlled by big corporate players. SMTP is email -- and people (outside of business email) all the more commonly use social networks for their communication. And even when they use email, a huge percentage of it is through Gmail. Heck, intra-gmail user emails don't even need (and maybe already don't) use SMTP/POP/IMAP at all, and that's a heck of a big percentage of today's email use. DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use them through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user experience). Ditto for TCP/IP. The fact that these protocols lark behind what we do at the higher level is irrelevant, when the abstractions we've built totally hide them, in ways that they didn't in the 80s and 90s. Here's some food for thought: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
- GTP 8y ago
  A corporation could replace TCP with some proprietary protocol (but I don't see why would some even think about it) but can't replace IP: IP is the protocol that routers on the internet use to know how to route packets, you can't replace it without implementing the new protocol on all the routers that your packets have to go through and those routers aren't own by a single company, so TCP/IP isn't going anywere soon and probably would never go away.
- bogomipz 8y ago
  >"DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use them through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user experience)." Except that those proprietary protocols would still need to go over the internet where every router uses IP. So no they could not drop TCP/IP tomorrow. And most(all?) of those 5-10 services you mention make extensive use of IP Anycasting of DNS servers which has allowed them to scale to what they are so DNS is very much relevant to the success of those services.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Except that those proprietary protocols would still need to go over the internet where every router uses IP. Special pipes and contracts could take care of that too. But in any case, it alone is small comfort when it comes to decentralization, since TPC/IP still allows total consolidation of control of anything that really matters to 5-10 companies (plus the telcos).
    - bogomipz 8y ago
      Please explain what these "special pipes" are connected to? Oh right they would have to to connect to "special routers" that didn't run IP at all. Special routers that these companies would have design and produce themselves. And convince carriers to put in their networks. Do you think these telcos, who have an almost adversarial towards these "over the top" services are going to build out a parallel network and commit cap ex to accommodate these companies new proprietary non-IP protocol networking devices? "Special contracts"? What does that even mean? The dustbin of history is filled with proprietary network protocols - DECnet, IBM's SNA, Xeros XNS, Banyan Vines, Novell Netware Apple Talk. There's a good reason the world converged on TCP/IP. Seriously your assertion is completely absurd.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        >Do you think these telcos, who have an almost adversarial towards these "over the top" services are going to build out a parallel network and commit cap ex to accommodate these companies new proprietary non-IP protocol networking devices? Telcos can (and sometimes are) part of nice profitable conglomerates with those "over the top" services. Inversely, other times those "over the top" services try to be their own telcos (e.g. AOL and TW/Cable, on one hand, and Google and it's Fiber or FB and its "balloon internet"). It's not unfathomable than one or the other will succeed at some point. Here's some food for thought: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-project-loon-balloon-facebook-aquila-internet-africa https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-project-loon-balloon-... >"Special contracts"? What does that even mean? Carriers have had special deals with companies like Facebook, (and of course with their own owned content delivery subsidiaries), since forever... >There's a good reason the world converged on TCP/IP. Yeah, and there's a even better reason why the first that can create a proprietary pipe and lock its users in even more will get off of it pronto. You don't want to be tied to commodity resources and technology if you can avoid it. We already have companies like Google who control both the half mobile OS space and half of the web's traffic (search, mail, video) and who venture into pushing their own protocols (AMP, SPDY, the "Google Wave Federation Protocol") and connectivity. In fact, if you had paid attention, you'd seen that Google already has not just plans, but it's own implementation, to replace TCP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC Probably they didn't get the memo about how "completely absurd" my assertion is...
- fouc 8y ago
  And chances are if you use SMTP outside of the main clients/mail servers, your emails might get marked as spam automatically before it reaches the intended recipient.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google Google is kind of useless without the rest of the web, though.

coldtea 8y ago

Why the sarcasm? It's true that (almost) no one uses them. Or, rather, no one much cares about them, and when they do use them, it's proxied and controlled by big corporate players. SMTP is email -- and people (outside of business email) all the more commonly use social networks for their communication. And even when they use email, a huge percentage of it is through Gmail. Heck, intra-gmail user emails don't even need (and maybe already don't) use SMTP/POP/IMAP at all, and that's a heck of a big percentage of today's email use. DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use them through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user experience). Ditto for TCP/IP. The fact that these protocols lark behind what we do at the higher level is irrelevant, when the abstractions we've built totally hide them, in ways that they didn't in the 80s and 90s. Here's some food for thought: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...

GTP 8y ago
A corporation could replace TCP with some proprietary protocol (but I don't see why would some even think about it) but can't replace IP: IP is the protocol that routers on the internet use to know how to route packets, you can't replace it without implementing the new protocol on all the routers that your packets have to go through and those routers aren't own by a single company, so TCP/IP isn't going anywere soon and probably would never go away.
bogomipz 8y ago
>"DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and so on (and even more so when they use them through mobile apps, which could drop DNS and TCP/IP tomorrow and connect through proprietary protocols and nothing much will change in the user experience)." Except that those proprietary protocols would still need to go over the internet where every router uses IP. So no they could not drop TCP/IP tomorrow. And most(all?) of those 5-10 services you mention make extensive use of IP Anycasting of DNS servers which has allowed them to scale to what they are so DNS is very much relevant to the success of those services.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Except that those proprietary protocols would still need to go over the internet where every router uses IP. Special pipes and contracts could take care of that too. But in any case, it alone is small comfort when it comes to decentralization, since TPC/IP still allows total consolidation of control of anything that really matters to 5-10 companies (plus the telcos).
  - bogomipz 8y ago
    Please explain what these "special pipes" are connected to? Oh right they would have to to connect to "special routers" that didn't run IP at all. Special routers that these companies would have design and produce themselves. And convince carriers to put in their networks. Do you think these telcos, who have an almost adversarial towards these "over the top" services are going to build out a parallel network and commit cap ex to accommodate these companies new proprietary non-IP protocol networking devices? "Special contracts"? What does that even mean? The dustbin of history is filled with proprietary network protocols - DECnet, IBM's SNA, Xeros XNS, Banyan Vines, Novell Netware Apple Talk. There's a good reason the world converged on TCP/IP. Seriously your assertion is completely absurd.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Do you think these telcos, who have an almost adversarial towards these "over the top" services are going to build out a parallel network and commit cap ex to accommodate these companies new proprietary non-IP protocol networking devices? Telcos can (and sometimes are) part of nice profitable conglomerates with those "over the top" services. Inversely, other times those "over the top" services try to be their own telcos (e.g. AOL and TW/Cable, on one hand, and Google and it's Fiber or FB and its "balloon internet"). It's not unfathomable than one or the other will succeed at some point. Here's some food for thought: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-project-loon-balloon-facebook-aquila-internet-africa https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-project-loon-balloon-... >"Special contracts"? What does that even mean? Carriers have had special deals with companies like Facebook, (and of course with their own owned content delivery subsidiaries), since forever... >There's a good reason the world converged on TCP/IP. Yeah, and there's a even better reason why the first that can create a proprietary pipe and lock its users in even more will get off of it pronto. You don't want to be tied to commodity resources and technology if you can avoid it. We already have companies like Google who control both the half mobile OS space and half of the web's traffic (search, mail, video) and who venture into pushing their own protocols (AMP, SPDY, the "Google Wave Federation Protocol") and connectivity. In fact, if you had paid attention, you'd seen that Google already has not just plans, but it's own implementation, to replace TCP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC Probably they didn't get the memo about how "completely absurd" my assertion is...
fouc 8y ago
And chances are if you use SMTP outside of the main clients/mail servers, your emails might get marked as spam automatically before it reaches the intended recipient.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> DNS is irrelevant when people just use 5-10 services: Google Google is kind of useless without the rest of the web, though.