1) Costs are borne by party X, benefits accrue to party Y
2) Costs pers user are independent of number of adopters, benefits are proportional to the number of adopters.
The network effect is only a virtuous circle once costs exceed benefits. Until that point is reached it is a chicken and egg problem.
One of the interesting features of this analysis is that every time I give it people:
1) Insist that the analysis is not novel, is obvious and unimaginative.
2) Continue to attempt the approach they admit is obviously going to fail.
One of the problems with modern academia is that novelty and cleverness are far more likely to advance a career than building stuff that actually works. So when we have a problem there is a bias in the academy towards an approach that is novel and allows the designer to demonstrate their cleverness rather than an approach that was proposed twenty years ago, before the problem was recognized as important.
Take the problem of BGP security. People seem to be attempting to authenticate the routes so as to protect the integrity of messages (assuming DNSSEC deployment). That seems to be a rather unlikely objective to achieve given the number of backbone providers, the number of packets and the fact that packets can be dropped. Trying to achieve anything more than preventing against Denial of Service attacks at the BGP layer is probably futile.
There are two issues, the binding of IP address range claims to AS numbers and the interchange of routing metrics. We could solve the first problem pretty easily using a straightforward approach. Each 24 hours the NICs all sign a list of the IP address assignments to public key holders they have granted.This can then be used to verify signatures. Quick, simple and does not require exploration in untested parts of the X.509 stack.
Instead we get a science project.
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