I haven't read all the emails that followed this one yet, but I went to the source and discussed it with John Gilmore, and have some comments from that discussion, inline below. A comment from Adriana that threw me was her suggestion that the Internet was "accidentally" peer to peer - I wanted John's opinion on that...
If you now consider the Net to be
> not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures
> who use the machines, it is more true than ever."
> (
http://www.toad.com/gnu/)
it the direction opposite to the internet's (accidental) peer-to-peer
and distributed design.
John knows this territory better than I do - here's his feedback on this point:
"The Internet was NOT accidentally peer-to-peer. It was quite
intentionally peer to peer. A look at some of the networks that
preceded it will make it quite clear. E.g. IBM's Bisync protocols had
a master and a slave -- a mainframe and an I/O device. Two computers
were not permitted to talk, nor two I/O devices. In 1974 where I
worked, we had two IBM mainframes in the same room and they couldn't
talk to each other; we moved email messages from one to the other by
writing them on a tape several times a day, and physically walking the
tape over to the other computer!!!
"The design of TCP makes it quite clear that it's only an upper level
protocol convention that one side is the 'originator' and the other
the 'target' (for example, an ssh and an sshd; or a browser and a web
server). If the higher level protocol, by any method, causes both
sides try to open a connection to each other simultaneously, they will
both succeed and a single TCP connection will result. See section 3.4
of RFC 793. They are true peers. This can happen in BitTorrent, for
example; two leaves find out about each other, and simultaneously
try to open a connection to each other."
The web is now pretty much hierarchical,
siloed, platformed and increasingly walled up. That's kinda my point
in everything I do. See here for a much better explanation that I have
done (so far!): http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
This comment really isn't about the web, it's about services provisioned over the web. There's a difference.
~ Jon