[talkingtab]

OMG ASN.1.

For those of you who missed this, there was a very interesting thing that happened in the growth of the internet.

At the time people were evolving the protocols through the IETF. So all the things that you rely on now - for the most part - just came into being. One day there was email. There was ftp. There was TCP. There were the Van Jacobson TCP mods.

At this time corporate types paid no attention to the internet. Academic types and the IETF were from what I saw the main developers.

Then one day the corporate world realized they might make money. But the development process of the protocols was incomprehensible (and incompatible) with the corporate culture. TCP was clearly a mess, all these protocols like DNS were a mess. From the corporate perspective.

So began the protocol wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars.

Whether ASN.1 was a product of that war or just a product of the corporate mentality, it serves as a powerful instance of the what the corporate world looks like vs the academic world looks like. You can find the wreckage from the war littered around. If you see and X.something protocol it could well be one of the relics. There were a few X.things that were adopted and useful, but were others that would haunt your dreams.

Although this is ancient history, and pretty much now told from the corporate perspective, it suggests to us that the corporate process for thinking is not as effective as the alternative - the IETF and Academic.

One is a sort of recipe culture. You write a recipe, everyone follows it and you are happy. The other is a sort of functional culture. If you can make bread and eat it you are happy. When the bread doesn't taste good you fix it.

Given the kind of bread that is commonly available in the US now, we can draw some conclusions about recipe thinking, recipe culture, corporate culture etc. One could even extend this paradigm of thinking to new things like AI. Or not.

[gorgoiler]

My partner and I were re-watching Father of the Bride the other day (rest in peace, Diane Keaton) and during the early parents meeting the son-in-law to-be describes himself as a communications consultant, working on X.25 networking installations.

I had to pause the movie and explain to my partner just how close the world came to missing out on The Internet, and having instead to suffer the ignominy of visiting sites with addresses like “CN=wikipedia, OU=org, C=US” and god knows what other dreadful protocols underlying them. I think she was surprised how angry and distressed I sounded! It would have been awful!

Poor her!

[inejge]

> how close the world came to missing out on The Internet

Monday-morning-quarterbacking is an unproductive pastime, but I don't think it was very close, on account of the Internet side having developed a bunch of useful (if a bit ramshackle) protocols and applications much faster than the ISO team, because the specs were freely available (not to mention written in a much more understandable manner). I still rue the day the IETF dropped the "distribution of this memo is unlimited" phrase from the RFC preambles. Yeah I understand that it originally had more to do with classification than general availability, but it described the ethos perfectly.

It's not all roses and we're paying for the freewheeling approach to this day in some cases, cf. email spam and BGP hijacking. But it gave results and provided unstoppable momentum.

[cryptonector]

> It's not all roses and we're paying for the freewheeling approach to this day in some cases, cf. email spam and BGP hijacking. But it gave results and provided unstoppable momentum.

Those are hard problems that ITU/OSI did not exactly have solutions for. Literally any thing that can be a target of spam becomes a target of spam soon enough, and fixing that is hard.

As for BGP, the rpki should fix that, though I'm told if I look I'll be sad (so I'm not looking).

[jcgl]

> As for BGP, the rpki should fix that, though I'm told if I look I'll be sad (so I'm not looking).

Afaiu, it’s even worse than you might think: RPKI doesn’t actually secure BGP. It provides only origin validation (i.e. which ASes may use which IP blocks). It critically does not provide path validation (i.e. which ASes may provide transit for which other ASes). Which is kind of a big deal.

[talkingtab]

I get your point and it is reasonable. We are paying today. However, I believe part of the problem is that when you could make money from email, it froze. The evolution stopped. We could easily evolve email if ...

The "if..." is one of the two VERY BIG INTERNET PROBLEMS. How do you pay for things? We have an answer which pollutes. Ads => enshitification. Like recipes for how to boil and egg that are three pages of ads, and then are wrong. But we now have AI, right?

The other problem is identities on the internet. This is hard. But email? Nope. Login with Apple? Nope. Login with Google? Double, Quadruple Nope.

In the real world we have both privacy AND accountability. And. It is very difficult to maintain two identities in real life.

Privacy on the internet? Nope. Accountability? Only if you are invested in your account. Privacy and Accountability together? Nope. Two identities? You can easily do 100's or more. freg@g*.com, greg33222@g*.com, janesex994@g*.com, dogs4humanity@g*.com etc.

[EvanAnderson]

There would have been a network like the Internet if the "Bellheads" in the ITU won. It would have been pay-by-the-byte-transferred.

[cryptonector]

That's roughly the same thing as saying there would not have been an Internet if the ITU/OSI crowd won. I think that's quite right. The yahoos at Berkeley and a bunch of other U.S. universities won, and I can just imagine how the Europeans who had high falutin ideas about how the Internet should be felt, and it's delicious.

[pohl]

Something tells me the corporations will get the last laugh, once web browsers stop showing you "the web" and only show you LLM hallucinations that superficially seem like the web.

[convolvatron]

I'm confused. much of your story is correct, but you replace the primary actors (the ITU and ISO) with 'corporate'. This is true is inasmuch as the ITU represented telephony culture, but isn't really representative of corporatism as a whole.

there is _another_ 'protocol war', but it was certainly a cold one. Internet companies starting in the late 90's just decided they weren't going to care any more about standardization efforts. They could take existing protocols and warp their intent. they could abandon the goal of universal reachability in order to make a product more consumable by the general public and add 'features'. basically whatever would stick. the poster child for this division was the development of IPv6 and the multicast protocols. The IETF just assumed that like the last 20 years, they would hash out the solutions and the network would deploy them. Except the rules had changed out from under them, the internet wasn't being run by government and academic agencies anymore, and the new crew just couldn't be bothered.

two wars. the IETF won the first through rough consensus and running code, but lost the second for nearly the same reason.

[OhMeadhbh]

"OMG ASN.1" is the name of my next band.

[p_l]

Protocol Wars are also a story of early enshittification of Internet, where attempts to push forward with solutions to already known problems were pushed back because they would require investment on vendor side instead of just carrying on using software majorly delivered free of charge because DoD needed a quick replacement for their PDP-10 fleet. (Only slight hyperbole)

A lot of issues also came from ISO standards refusing to get stuck without known anticipated issues taken care of, or with unextendable lockin due to accidental temporary solution ending up long term one, while IETF protocols happily ran forward "because we will fix it later" only to find out that I stalled base ossified things - one of the lessons is to add randomness to new protocols so that naive implementation will fail on day one.

Then there were accidental things, like a major ASN.1 implementation for C in 1990 being apparently shit (a tradition picked up in even worse way by OpenSSL and close to most people playing with X.509 IMO), or even complaints about ASN.1 encodings being slow due to CPU lacking barrel shifters (I figure it must refer to PER somehow)

[themafia]

> From the corporate perspective.

Which was very much synonymous with "mainframe perspective." Which is the real lens to examine ASN.1 through.