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Isn't it possible to keep tracing things back to a more base layer beyond what you've described though? It's kind of arbitrary to draw the line any particular p

Isn't it possible to keep tracing things back to a more base layer beyond what you've described though? It's kind of arbitrary to draw the line any particular place. Like I could write "it's unclear to me if the person who wrote 'interacted with core internet infrastructure at the router, BGP, major transit and transport service provider ISP level' has ever interacted with electrical grid management, power plant operations, or coal or natural gas pipelines and logistics. I find it very hard to take seriously prognostication from persons who've never been responsible for the electrical input of a nationstate." But then someone else could just respond to that with a similar message about how those who control the powergrid are hard to take seriously when they've never grown their own food or managed the food and water needs of humans who run the powergrid.

walrus01 6y ago
Yes, but "The Internet" is an actual specific thing composed of stuff at OSI layer 1, and various other things at layers 2-7 in the rest of the model. If a person whose only experience with it is at the software application layer starts opining about what internet infrastructure should look like underneath what their knowledge base encompasses, I would try to determine what if any experience they might have with actually running an ISP. To follow your analogy, I don't agree with the concept, because it would be more like criticizing an article titled "Who controls the power grid", in which the author opines on some cryptocurrency based solution for something related to the grid, but has no experience actually running the grid as an electrical engineer at the BPA or TVA might have.
kortilla 6y ago
No, TCP/IP and the ability to exchange routes between different networks is what makes the Internet. All of the value is in these interconnected networks and being able to send traffic to arbitrary endpoints regardless of your provider. There is no “base layer” beneath TCP/IP. That’s the beauty of the Internet. The underlying ISPs connecting together will have different lower level protocols, different internal routing protocols, different hardware, different software, different power sources, different currencies, different spoken languages, etc. AWS/Google/Cloudflare could cease to exist tomorrow and the Internet would continue on just fine. There would be a ton of websites down for US/European residents, but the Internet would work nonetheless.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  > There is no “base layer” beneath TCP/IP. Actually, there usually are. Physical transport layers run their own protocols and the physical media themselves (in case we are not talking OTA) also count as layers in the stack. And while these have been mostly commoditized whoever controls them does have a lot of power.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > Actually, there usually are. Physical transport layers run their own protocols and the physical media themselves Whoosh, you missed the point. The “base layer” of the Internet is the one that allows cross-connectivity of the networks. All of the layers beneath tcp/ip are interchangeable and people will still be able to get on the Internet. > And while these have been mostly commoditized whoever controls them does have a lot of power. They were immediately commoditized by design when we standardized on IP. IP over MPLS vs IP over ATM vs IP over frame relay looks no different to the end user. In one minute I can roam from a network based on dwdm to one based on microwave back-haul and I still can connect to hackernews and pull down comments over TCP/IP. When people want “Internet access”, the vast majority don’t give two shits about the medium, the link layer protocols, or anything like that. They want IP connectivity that has decent speeds. That’s the “base layer” that everything on the Internet is built on. Anything below that is transparently (and frequently) replaced because it’s an irrelevant implementation detail stripped off at the boundary of each network.
- walrus01 6y ago
  > There is no “base layer” beneath TCP/IP. The people who run the DWDM systems in my region might disagree with that statement :) Not a network protocol layer but there's plenty of transport gear that exists at layers 1/2 in the OSI model and is opaque to people who are looking at things from the perspective of router-to-router (or metro ethernet L2 transport) adjacencies.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    If someone can get by without your technology and access the Internet, it’s not the base layer of the Internet. DWDM and whatever other technologies are important but simultaneously irrelevant when discussing the base layer of the Internet. Everything online is built on TCP/IP so Twitter doesn’t need to do anything if Comcast switches from DWDM to pigeon carrier as backhaul.

walrus01 6y ago

Yes, but "The Internet" is an actual specific thing composed of stuff at OSI layer 1, and various other things at layers 2-7 in the rest of the model. If a person whose only experience with it is at the software application layer starts opining about what internet infrastructure should look like underneath what their knowledge base encompasses, I would try to determine what if any experience they might have with actually running an ISP. To follow your analogy, I don't agree with the concept, because it would be more like criticizing an article titled "Who controls the power grid", in which the author opines on some cryptocurrency based solution for something related to the grid, but has no experience actually running the grid as an electrical engineer at the BPA or TVA might have.

kortilla 6y ago

No, TCP/IP and the ability to exchange routes between different networks is what makes the Internet. All of the value is in these interconnected networks and being able to send traffic to arbitrary endpoints regardless of your provider. There is no “base layer” beneath TCP/IP. That’s the beauty of the Internet. The underlying ISPs connecting together will have different lower level protocols, different internal routing protocols, different hardware, different software, different power sources, different currencies, different spoken languages, etc. AWS/Google/Cloudflare could cease to exist tomorrow and the Internet would continue on just fine. There would be a ton of websites down for US/European residents, but the Internet would work nonetheless.

jacquesm 6y ago
> There is no “base layer” beneath TCP/IP. Actually, there usually are. Physical transport layers run their own protocols and the physical media themselves (in case we are not talking OTA) also count as layers in the stack. And while these have been mostly commoditized whoever controls them does have a lot of power.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Actually, there usually are. Physical transport layers run their own protocols and the physical media themselves Whoosh, you missed the point. The “base layer” of the Internet is the one that allows cross-connectivity of the networks. All of the layers beneath tcp/ip are interchangeable and people will still be able to get on the Internet. > And while these have been mostly commoditized whoever controls them does have a lot of power. They were immediately commoditized by design when we standardized on IP. IP over MPLS vs IP over ATM vs IP over frame relay looks no different to the end user. In one minute I can roam from a network based on dwdm to one based on microwave back-haul and I still can connect to hackernews and pull down comments over TCP/IP. When people want “Internet access”, the vast majority don’t give two shits about the medium, the link layer protocols, or anything like that. They want IP connectivity that has decent speeds. That’s the “base layer” that everything on the Internet is built on. Anything below that is transparently (and frequently) replaced because it’s an irrelevant implementation detail stripped off at the boundary of each network.
walrus01 6y ago
> There is no “base layer” beneath TCP/IP. The people who run the DWDM systems in my region might disagree with that statement :) Not a network protocol layer but there's plenty of transport gear that exists at layers 1/2 in the OSI model and is opaque to people who are looking at things from the perspective of router-to-router (or metro ethernet L2 transport) adjacencies.
- kortilla 6y ago
  If someone can get by without your technology and access the Internet, it’s not the base layer of the Internet. DWDM and whatever other technologies are important but simultaneously irrelevant when discussing the base layer of the Internet. Everything online is built on TCP/IP so Twitter doesn’t need to do anything if Comcast switches from DWDM to pigeon carrier as backhaul.