> But on the other hand, while what you say about economics is undoubtedly > true, don't we want to keep the peer-to-peer option open *as a matter of > principle*? After all, we still have that option for phone calls, even though > it's now a minority usage pattern for mobile devices. >
How much money are consumers willing to fork out as a premium for a matter of principle? The answer is uncomfortable, I suspect. I find this world we’ve backed into about as crappy and unpleasant as anyone else on this int-area list, and like many others I wish it were otherwise. But as many folk have said in the past, when assessing where we are and what to do about it, the trick is not in seeing what's around us - everyone sees that. The trick is to believe what we see. The phone companies saw their destruction but simply could not believe it. There are many such examples. The commercial marketplace, in striving for bigger, faster, and cheaper has simply cut out the network from the picture and is trying to take replicated content as close as it can to the user. The economic imperatives that have driven us to this place are, in retrospect, inescapable. Yes, a lot has been discarded along the way, including every protocol except HTTPS, but the harsh rule is that if not enough consumers are prepared to pay for it, directly or indirectly, then it just doesn't happen any more. There is innovation happening to return to the subject line of this thread, but the innovation is happening in those places where there is money and a certain impatience to shift things around, and in the last decade or so that is heading up into the world of content and applications. The lower layers, including platform and network are not only commoditised, but steadily ossifying. There is just no money and no desire to shake up these lower layers right now, nor in the immediate to medium term future. As a network layer person I personally find this a pretty sad situation, and I would like it to be otherwise. But the capital markets don't listen to me. They are busy talking up the content and cloud folk who are busy pushing out replicated content ever closer to the consumer, and they neither care nor value anything else. Geoff _______________________________________________ Int-area mailing list Int-area@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/int-area
