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

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

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

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Andrew Sullivan
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