End to End versus “buy our box” How computer system design principles interact with telecom policy, politics, and much else

End to End versus “buy our box”

How computer system design principles interact with telecom policy, politics, and much else.

May 24, 2004 tmdenton.com 2

Chapter 1:Three models of communication Broadcasting, telecommunications and the

Internet Who speaks? How many can speak? Who listens? How much influence does the owner of the

system have over what is communicated? Who governs? Is it licensed?


Broadcasting: Regulation makes Scarcity Requires a spectrum licence, from which

the broadcasting licence follows. One-to-many, passive reception High capital costs, high programming costs The receiver is a special purpose box

which cannot transmit to others Heavily regulated as to content; subsidized

by government in Canada


Telephone system: Regulation to alleviate scarcity Very high capital costs, which used to make it

resistant to competition. System highly determines the uses to which it can

be put. Innovation determined by owners, not users. Slow adoption of technical change (e.g. chips took 20 years to be placed in switches,

yet grew out of telecom research) Intelligence is in the network, not the edges. Proprietary standards (SS7) States are at the core of telephony (ITU).


Internet: Lack of Scarcity Users determine the purposes to which it can be

put; carriers have least influence. One to many, one-to-one Intelligence at the edges, not in the centre. Users share in the capital costs (upgrades). Users benefit from Moore’s and other “laws”

network efficiency. Open standards (TCP/IP) Near infinite address space (IPv6)


Railways and Roads The issue is vertical integration upward

from the roadbed into the transport system, and from there onward.Should the railway own the farms?

How far should industries be vertically integrated into the carrier?

Issues of discrimination never go away, even when prices are no longer regulated


Internet 2 As costs of production decline, the most

significant factor is human Every man a publisher, with global reach, at low

cost.


political consequences The organization of society is influenced

by its characteristic technologies


Chapter 2: Markets and firms as organizing ideas Market:

Legal autonomy of persons

Power to buy, sell and own

Prices tell us what to make, and what can profitably be made (coordination role of prices)

contractors

Firms: Hierarchy, rank,

obedience Objective rules Accountability to

shareholders and the law

Employees serve, owe loyalty


Non-market institutions Governments (departments reporting to

ministers) Courts of law Churches Regiments, fraternities and orders Universities and schools Cooperative enterprize


The re-emergence of cooperative enterprize Peers self-select to contribute Most effort is voluntary Some form of leadership is required

(OED, SETI-at-home, Mersenne prime search, zeta grid for Riemann hypothesis)

Depends on the very cheap linking of people and surplus time and capacity in their computers.


The Internet makes peer production more important Commons-based peer production, old and new

Oxford English dictionary, science Wikipedia, slashdot

As machines become more and more concerned with the organization of information as instructions (e.g. proteins), tools that allows us to manipulate and assemble information collectively will gain in importance. What if two or three of us, or 2 or 2 thousand of us,

could share our watches and produce a car? A protein? A new theory of matter?


Old media, new media Control the pipe, control

the content Large costs mean you

sell to the largest audience

Information and programming sells advertisements

Passive consumers, not participants

No one controls the pipe Small costs of production Chiefly editorial opinion

(blogs) Many voices, many

participants Engaged citizens versus

élites vying for influence Radically distributed

information production


Chapter 3: Telecom Policy Every law assumes a set of problems that need

solving. Telecommunications law:

Interconnection to assure end-to-end service (1919) later, access to underlying facilities

Assumes monopoly power needs constraining Just and reasonable rates No self-preference


Circuit Switching is Yesterday Telecoms basic idea is the circuit switch

Line held open end–to-end synchronous Telephone number is the routing instruction Optimized for voice

Telecoms business model is to charge By distance, time of day, size of circuit

A fixed purpose technology which, though computerized, is a pre-computer idea.


Chapter 4: Briefest History of the Internet http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml Global network of computers – JCR Licklider (1962),

who became head of computer program at DARPA Packet switching – Leonard Kleinrock persuades Larry

Roberts of DARPA of its merits Roberts puts out idea for ARPANET (1967) Various engineers think of packet switching circa 1967

(Baran, Davies, Scantlebury, 4 computers are linked by 1969


Internetworking “The Internet as we now know it embodies a key

underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level "Internetworking Architecture".”

open-architecture networking was first introduced by Bob Kahn shortly after arriving at DARPA in 1972 .


TCP/IP and the DNS IP provides only for addressing and forwarding of

individual packets, and the separate TCP is concerned with service features such as flow control and recovery of lost packets.

DOD accepts TCP/IP as the standard in 1983. To make it easy for people to use the network, hosts were

assigned names, so that it was not necessary to remember the numeric addresses. Paul Mockapetris invents the DNS to handle the increased number of hosts.


4 principles of open architecture Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no

internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.

Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn't make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.

Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.

There would be no global control at the operations level.


Innovation without permission A key concept of the Internet is that it was not

designed for just one application, but as a general infrastructure on which new applications could be conceived. World Wide Web, ICQ, Napster, KaZaa,

email Importance of the Internet only now being felt. 21

years since establishment of TCP/IP in 1983. Copyright panic (DMCA)


End to end (e2e) End to end arguments are about where to situate

functions in a computer system Locate the functions higher up the protocol stack,

towards the edge, closest to the application. Keep the transportation function as unspecified as

possible (down the protocol stack). Do not over-specify the solution; a system

optimized for one application (voice telephony) is less useful for others.


Layered Systems – The Protocol Stack End-to-end

arguments may be viewed as part of a set of rational principles for organizing such layered systems.

TCP-4th layer IP – 3rd layer


In the Internet, the application is separated from the transport by TCP/IP.


Different layers perform different functions


Chapter 5: Telecom meets Internet The last mile has been the insuperable barrier to

wire-based competition. Unbundling and co-location - Infinite series of

issues can be litigated and regulated. Cable the only significant source of competition;

satellite and fixed wireless a bust. FCC gave up on unbundling regulation after a set

of Court reversals (2003)


Will the last mile blockage save the PSTN? The end-to-end argument implies that we do not get to its

complete state until the “last mile” blockage is removed. Will user-owned wireless break the last mile monopoly? Or is this a question of failing to obey the regulator? In

Japan, the telecom operator obeyed the regulator and unbundled. The US litigated the 96 Telecom Act to death.

Once you get SIP in open source, Internet access, and analog telephone adapters, no control points are left. You bypass the charging mechanism, taxation, reciprocal compensation, rate arbitrage, and 100 years of regulation.


Chapter 6: Content, logical, and physical layers Notionally, all

communications can be divided into three layers.

Each layer can be owned or not owned under different property arrangements.

Hyde Park content-speech Logical – language Physical – the speaker’s

corner

Telecommunications Content – speech Logical – ss7 Physical – switches and

cables

Internet Content – applications Logical – TCP/IP Physical – routers and

cables


Intellectual Property

(DMCA)

Property resistant

Held in common

censorship Censorship resistant

Trusted systems

applications freeware

Operating systems (MS) Linux

Naming and addressing systems (DNS)

SS7 MPLS (QoS) TCP/IP

satellite cable DSL Muni FTTH

User-owned


Terms from previous chart Blue-coloured boxes mean they are subject to private

appropriation, or work against the end-to-end principle. Trusted systems – only communication from those who

have been vetted. DMCA – illegal to get around the box. Getting the

lawmaker to enforce the business model QoS – Quality of service – price discrimination is natural

and the Internet, by preventing it, works against the natural impulse of the carrier.


The open society Industrial era communications is ending. A low-cost peer-to-peer communication is

spreading. It is a conscious political arrangement. It is already rendering obsolete business

models (music, newspapers, telephony) The threatened will seek regulatory and

legal protection.


Acknowledgments www.tmdenton.com Thanks to Yochai

Benkler, Andrew Odlyzko, Richard Shockey, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Larry Lessig, Jane Jacobs

Figures by Albert Prisner

Documents

End to End versus “buy our box” How computer system design principles interact with telecom policy, politics, and much else