On the contrary, these are not muddy grey area topics that are open to barnum statements, gaslighting, and misrepresentation, such as: > In the end, no one car

On the contrary, these are not muddy grey area topics that are open to barnum statements, gaslighting, and misrepresentation, such as: > In the end, no one cares about the end-to-end principle This assertion couldn't be more wrong. I care; many others care; caring about the architecture of the Internet did not die with John Postel. > you have to ask the question: what is an endpoint? No, we don't: it's covered in networking 101. Any party in a layered protocol whose interactions are opaque to the layers below and transparent to the layers above. And they're defined by those interactions, not by their implementation. A CDN is a forward caching proxy for content layered over HTTP, and that's all that matters when it comes to realising their emergent properties. Don't be hypnotized by the shiny dangly extras that the providers wave around hoping to distract attention from what they actually offer, or why they do it, or the consequences.