Re: Bad/Good ideas and damage control by experienced participants

[Miles Fidelman <[e-mail]>]

John Levine wrote:
> It appears that Miles Fidelman  <[e-mail]> said:
>> Which kind of raises the question of "who speaks & stands for the core
>> philosophies behind the Internet?"  Perhaps a role for ISOC and the IAB
>> - while there are still those of us around who remember the earliest
>> days of the net.
> Um, ISOC is on it.
>
> https://www.internetsociety.org/action-plan/2022/internet-way-of-networking/
Not very visibly, though.  How is it that I've never seen this - despite 
playing in policy circles, a lot?
> But I would suggest that "we did it that way in 1983" is not as compelling
> an argument as some around here might imagine.
>
But that's not the actual message, is it?  It's more like "we learned 
these lessons the hard way," and "these have emerged as best practices."

Sure, things need to be updated once in a while, but we rely on building 
codes, safety standards, design rules, etc. when it comes to pretty much 
every other form of infrastructure.  The Internet has become 
Infrastructure (as Vint once defined it, while speaking at a conference 
I helped organize. "it's everywhere, we use it all the time, we only 
notice it when it breaks") -- we should manage it like infrastructure.

Miles

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown