[Din] Re: next steps for DINRG Re: 202410191733.AYC

["Abraham Y. Chen" <[e-mail]>]

Dear Dirk:

0)    I have been reading the eMail threads and learning the charter of 
this Group for awhile. I would like to start from trying to understand 
your first DINRG objective:

1)    " Investigation of the root causes of Internet centralization ...  ":

     Centralization vs. decentralization in a system could manifest in 
surprisingly alternating manners depending on which particular 
perspective that one's investigation is focused upon. For example,

     A.    During the Internet infancy days, the PSTN (Public Switched 
Telephone Network) was criticized as being too centralized implying that 
the Internet would be distributed or decentralized. As this Group 
agrees, the Internet is now far from being decentralized, after all. The 
reason for this discrepancy is that back then colleagues were looking at 
the network facility to assume that the operations would have the same 
characteristics.

     B.    Comparing the operations today, we find that Internet users 
have no permanent identity, except temporarily assigned by 
multi-national business conglomerates, thus not able to freely 
communicate with one another, starting from even a neighbor. This means 
that the Internet operation today is a centralized one. In contrast, 
PSTN supports dial-up modems that enable any and every user the freedom 
/ flexibility / independence of contacting anyone around the world 
anytime for data communication (This was how the Internet initially got 
popularized, although very slow by today's standards) which is clearly a 
distributed and decentralized operation.

2)    The above may sound contradicting that a centralized facility 
supports decentralized operation while a decentralized one operates 
centralized. The fact is that the top layer operational behavior of a 
system determines which way it is from a user's viewpoint. In OSI 7 
Layer model, as far as I could understand, we should set 
distributed/decentralized as the criterion at OSI Layer 7 for every 
system. Which way the lower Layers appear to be really does not matter, 
as long as they can eventually support the ultimate goal.

3)    More specifically, the PSTN core equipment is so centralized that 
the identity of every subscriber loop is predetermined with a phone 
number. So, a CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) can be mass produced 
without the capability to acquire an identification upon plugging into a 
jack at the end of a subscriber loop. Essentially, the DHCP operation 
has already been accomplished in a user's mind. In the Internet, 
however, an IoT has to go through the process of acquiring an IP address 
(yet temporary) from the network core before it can operate, which means 
that an user can not operate independently at well.

4)    The above may be vague, unorganized, or philosophical. This is 
because I just began to formulate this analytical approach for 
visualizing the problem at hand. I believe that we do need to exercise 
our minds from this angle, or similar to be able to set the criteria and 
priority for qualifying an application or operation. So that, we may 
have some chance to achieve the goal of "decentralizing the Internet".

5)    Essentially, I believe that if a user does not have a permanent 
identity (static IP address) for communication through a system, the 
operation becomes centralized by having to rely upon a focal facility 
serving the coordination functions.

I look forward to your thoughts.

Regards,


Abe (2024-10-20 10:21 EDT)



On 2024-10-18 04:41, Dirk Kutscher wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> in Dublin, we are planning to continue our discussion on next steps 
> for DINRG.
>
> To that end, we are soliciting suggestions, interests indications, and 
> questions here. If you have a suggestion, please feel free to share it 
> here or by personal e-mail.
>
> We will collect everything and then prepare a summary before the meeting.
>
> As a bit of background:
>
> As chartered, DINRG has different objectives:
>
>  *
>
>     Investigation of the root causes of Internet centralization, and
>     articulation of the impacts of the market economy, architecture
>     and protocol designs, as well as government regulations;
>
>  *
>
>     Measurement of the Internet centralization and the consequential
>     societal impacts;
>
>  *
>
>     Characterization and assessment of observed Internet centralization;
>
>  *
>
>     Development of a common terminology and understanding of
>     (de-)centralization;
>
>  *
>
>     Interaction with the broader research community to explore new
>     research topics and technical solutions for decentralized system
>     and application development;
>
>  *
>
>     Documentation of the outcome from the above efforts via different
>     means (e.g., research papers and RFCs) as inputs to the broader
>     conversation around centralization; and
>
>  *
>
>     Facilitation of discussions between researchers, organizations and
>     individuals involved in Internet standards and regulations.
>
> Let us know, which of these objectives should be emphasized in your 
> view, and whether you have specific interests within these topics that 
> should be discussed more.
>
> Best regards,
> Dirk and Lixia
>
>
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