Re: [hrpc] new title for draft-tenoever-hrpc-political

[Tony Rutkowski <[e-mail]>]

Good start on dealing with a key consideration in this draft.  A section
discussing the subject along these lines seems essential for anything
purporting to deal with the subject.  Minimally, a definition is
necessary.  Simply proffering a research question on whether network
standards are political when the answer is well known, doesn't provide much.

Agreed on the broader organization scope, however, that requires some
substantial understanding of the rather large array of organizations
that produce internetwork standards.

As to the telephone networks being internetworks - it would be devise a
construct that excluded them.  It's worth noting that the backplane
signalling component - currently SS7 or its equivalent  - were the first
large-scale implementation of connectionless datagram protocols - the
basic definition used by DARPA and OSI internets.  The  transport paths
globally for both the networks and signalling get routed through many
diverse networks along the path between endpoints.  There is also the
irony that the first  RFC on tagging DARPA host address - what done by
Jim White and he invokes telephone networks as the model.  A further
irony is the use of ENUM on DARPA internets to resolve telephony end points.

--tony


On 18-Aug-18 5:12 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 18, 2018 at 03:52:45PM -0400, Tony Rutkowski wrote:
>> 1. The scope seems to be limited to IETF standards over the past 20
>> years.  It  would seem a stretch to apply more broadly, but you could
>> try if a lot of changes were made, e.g., treating the scores of other
>> standards bodies.
> It might well be that section 5 has gradually focussed the discussion
> toward IETF standards.  It's not clear to me that this is a good idea,
> because (for instance), while W3C standards are only for the web and
> not the whole Internet, an _awful lot_ of them are directly relevant
> to the material in the draft.  Moreover, the standards-making activity
> at W3C is similar to, without being the same as, the IETF style.  In a
> different way, the activity of the GSMA might be directly relevant to
> internetworking in a few areas (more on this below).  This suggests to
> me, however, that the draft needs to spend more time on some of those
> other standards efforts (or else, as you say, restrict its focus
> exclusively to the IETF.  I just think it would be a much less
> interesting result if it applied only to the IETF, because the
> obvious response to it would be that any issues it raises would only
> be true of the IETF and therefore one just shouldn't use the IETF for
> those cases).
>
>> 2. "Internetworking" is never defined, so who knows what that means?
> I think it is the activity of making different networks, formally
> independent and otherwise notionally contractually unbound to one
> another, interoperate through a common substrate protocol with as much
> as practical of the intelligence at or near the end of the internet.
> TCP/IP is, in this view, an internetworking protocol because it is end to
> end yet does not depend on transitive contractual relationships
> through the entire path in order to allow network flows.  The ARPANET
> NCP is _not_ an internetworking protocol, and neither is something
> like the catanet approach with smart gateways.  Similarly, several
> "internet of things" protocols (like ZigBee and ZWave) are not really
> internet protocols at all, but kinds of local network that require a
> gateway which then connects to the internet (or possibly the global
> Internet).  Therefore, …
>
>> 3.  X.25 data networks, SDH/SONET, SS7, mobile telephony networks are
>> not designed for internetworking?  Really? :-)
> …really, or anyway sort-of-really.  There is an argument to be made
> for X.25, though I sometimes wonder whether the VC/PVC approach really
> was internetworking given the focus on the DTE.
>
> SDH/SONET is something on which you happen to be able to build
> internets (just as Ethernet is) but it is not actually an
> internetworking technology as I am using the term.  It most certainly
> _is_ a network technology, so if the draft wants to talk about all
> network technologies I agree it ought to be included.  But that seems
> to me to be a much larger topic than the draft is discussing, and I
> think it will be hard to expand this discussion to include (e.g.)
> ITU-T and ISO standards effectively, given that their development
> works quite differently.
>
> SS7 is not, in my meaning, an internetworking protocol because phone
> systems simply aren't internetworks.  They rely on transitive
> contractual relationships (sometimes those contracts are encoded as
> treaties or national law, but they're still not merely best efforts
> the way internets are).  They are, again, important networks.  They're
> also networks that rely on multiple networks connected together.  But
> that interconnection does not happen as an internet does.
>
> Finally, some of the parts of the mobile telelphony environment are
> internetty, and some other parts are not.  It's hard for me to speak
> generically.  I do think that at least many parts of 5G are not
> intended to be internet protocols, but instead to substitute the
> catanet style of networking for internetworking.  Whether that is a
> good idea is an open question (but, fortunately, not one for this
> discussion).
>
> Best regards,
>
> A
>