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by na85
1858 days ago
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Bittorrent alone probably accounts for a huge chunk of internet traffic, and it's not http. SMTP and NNTP probably also account for large fractions because the MTAs still speak SMTP, not HTTPS and Usenet itself is something like 100 TB per day. Either way, arguing that the web == the internet based on protocol usage is to me a bit like arguing TCP == HTTP/S. They're different things at a conceptual level and the semantics are an important distinction to a lot of applications. |
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As I said, the end user's OSI layer 1 is the infrastructure's OSI layer 6 anyways. How the routing layer is achieved doesn't matter, as the masses use HTTP as a protocol (Android, iOS, Browser).
Sidenote: The torrent protocol and BENCODE is usually encapsulated in its transport layer (and yes, it's HTTP/S) as raw UDP is blocked and can't be used to discover peers in most settings due to carrier-grade NATs not offering a way to have a public IP anymore.
I never denied that other protocols exist, hence the reason for my previous comment.
But when people actively shame others for not knowing how routing infrastructure is solved, I think the argumentation baseline is wrong on the technical side that should know better and therefore argue better.
Users use HTTP. Mobile E-Mail clients that use SMTP/IMAP are dying out and moving over to HTTPS infrastructure and REST/JSON based APIs.
Look at G-Mail, look at Outlook, look at any large-scale E-Mail provider's Apps in the Play Store or App Store. The AOSP E-Mail client is the rare exception, and their network traffic gets blocked in most countries I've visited when not using a VPN.
My comment was about the argument that other protocols exist for legacy reasons, and I was challenging the general assumption in the sense that mobile took over most portions of the "internet". And mobile only uses web-based network protocols.
My argument was that in the future, it's very likely to see other protocols for our infrastructure to move over to HTTPS as a transport layer. SMTP/IMAP via HTTPS or something similar is very likely to be once DNS via HTTPS is rolled out and the default.
> Either way, arguing that the web == the internet based on protocol usage is to me a bit like arguing TCP == HTTP/S
Coming back to the argument that someone might also argue that TCP==HTTP/S:
As all internet traffic is encapsulated by SONET on the ISP side, the very same argument would be that UDP and TCP aren't used (so VC == TCP/UDP?) - as the real transport layer is VC4 or similar containerized point to point protocols.
We can also play this a little longer up to the point where cables are not really cables anymore because of fibre infrastructure and how wavelengths are multiplexed, but that wasn't my point.
My point was that given the "internet infrastructure" of users having a router box thingie at home and they connect to their view of the internet, they'll use HTTP most of the time.
ISP-provided routers usually don't even have a configuration capability to unblock other protocols anymore, so other network protocols will very likely die out soon because UDP 53 and HTTP are always allowed (hence the reason for the DNS via HTTPS movement).
And having worked at an ISP to know these things is a very rare conditional state, and therefore that specialized knowledge cannot be extrapolated to the general society.