On 10/1/19 12:21 AM, Nico Williams wrote:
I'm always amused, and a bit concerned, by the assumption that the Internet
will not change significantly. From my perspective, the Internet seems to
constantly change. Not long ago it was hard to imagine any new transport
protocol getting much traction, for example. And the tussles between the
application writers and enterprise network operators haven't gone away.
The Internet could change so much as to disappear, or so little as to be
recognizable in 30 years. Who knows. But the forseeable future as to
new transport protocols atop IP is pretty easy to forecast: as long as
default middle box behavior is to drop protocols they don't speak, new
transport protocols won't get deployed.
Or maybe they'll get deployed, but have a degraded fallback mode in
which they impersonate other protocols. Which, after all, is pretty
much what has been happening for many years now.
And these middleboxs... many of
them are cheap, update-less consumer devices that will be with us for
many years yet.
If they're cheap they can be replaced for one reason or another. All it
takes is for some popular app to perform more poorly in the presence of
such middleboxes, and perhaps for ISPs to have to deal with support
calls caused by such boxes. Or some fad that can be used to sell new,
slightly less dysfunctional, boxes.
Lots of things, of course, can happen. If you're looking for a path
back to the good old days in which the IP layer was transparent, I also
have a hard time finding a likely scenario that gets us there.
Meanwhile there are still clever people trying to do new things with the
Internet, in spite of the middleboxes and unscrupulous operators trying
to keep applications in cages. And those clever people don't
necessarily feel compelled to play by the old rules either.
Keith
