Author: David D. Clark
themes
Summary
notes
History of the Internet
- ISO (international standards organization) started making an internet proposal (OSI) but it was defeated by the US-government funded one
- people have always misconstrued the internet as whatever the dominant application at the time was, but in reality it is this general network for connecting data (and therefore people)
- email in the late 1900s
- then the Web (WWW) in 2000
- then huge platforms of today (Netflix, Amazon, FB, Google, etc.)
Architecture of the internet
- architecture as “the things on which we have to agree, things on which it is highly convenient to agree, the basic modularity of the system, functional dependencies, or aspects of the system that are expected to be long-lasting.”
- unlike physical architecture which lays out very specifically how the building must be constructed, the architecture of the internet must be more general and less prescriptive to allow for the application layer to be very general
- ”tussle” — situation where different actors in Internet ecoystem do not have aligned incentives
- e.g. open platform of the internet and desire of investors to maximize return