My Totally Weird View of Why the “Best Effort” Internet Will Be Destroyed
In “ Stupid Net Tricks,” Robert X. Cringely makes an excellent argument as to why the “Best Effort” Internet should exist. He reminds us of the wisdom behind its simplicity:
Yet the Internet is used all the time for just the sort of communication services that it is supposedly not optimized to support. Where TCP was slow, UDP was faster. So too for ftp and http. The Internet is in constant flux and is improving just fine without the need for some overbearing control group to impose a new order. This very flexibility comes from the simple rules of the Best Effort network. The Internet is a stupid network that just schleps bits, and that is the major secret of its success. Where a telephone network might have engineered into it the capability for call waiting and caller ID, those functions can be programmed atop the Internet without requiring any changes in the underlying network. It’s the applications, stupid, and Congress doesn’t seem to understand that.
Since I am an ultra, ultra, ultra conservative, this reminds me of the legendary situation in Biblical Genesis where there was one, primal law for the Adam. But then, there was The Fall—and by the time we get to Leviticus we have way more than ten commandments. Fast-forward to the Universal Caucasian Christian world we live in now: there are at least hundreds of thousands of laws written by the flesh men citizens of each nation state. And these synthetic laws exist because too few people come from healthy families that are connected to the “natural” environment. No one sane on Earth should disagree with the next sentence:
The natural environment makes sense.
How do you feel?
OK?
But, when you claim to be an alien from a fictitious planet, god-blessed with “superior intelligence,” you can disconnect yourself from nature and make up all kinds of shit. You don’t have to make sense—you can just be logical. When you make up all kinds of shit, you need ways and means to distribute your shit to a captive audience. (It is no accident that the Imperial Romans were so great at plumbing.)
The Internet (as of this morning) does not create captive audiences in the same manner that our neo-Roman telco/cable oligarchs are used to. The powerful, alien, shit makers do not like this. It would not surprise me to find some raving lefty of the future on a lonely street corner trying to tell the world the truth about Internet censorship in Red China. This bleeding heart exposé may be telling us that the reason why big American companies ‘helped’ China successfully effect centrally-controlled censorship against billions of people was because, once perfected, the same technologies would be used on the “free” world. China would be the guinea pig. Lord, help us. This is not the nature of dominion.