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I'm coming from a similar place and think it very important to preserve the peer-oriented nature of the Internet, so you don't have to convince me. But I disagree on the prescription, because in the long term, economics wears down regulations (and here in the good ole USSA it's short-circuited right from the start!) I don't see the way forward being based on IP addressing (+dns) as identity, which is ultimately what you're talking about. First, the end to end principle arose out of engineering concerns, and IP does nothing to preserve data opaqueness against a network that wishes to categorize traffic. And given that there is little money in transporting commodity bits, yet some of those bits are quite valuable (work VPN session..), there is an ever-present economic incentive for discrimination. Referencing UL=DL doesn't really make sense. Even with an ideal buildout of multi-homed homes mesh-connected through each other, there's still going to be a network "core" that has more long-haul bandwidth than the outskirts. If I wish to publish a file to many people, it makes more sense to send that data once to the core, and fan out through there (whether by a server, multicast, or some new method). My ISP is Sonic.net - I wouldn't call them crooks, and given the competition wouldn't begrudge them an administration fee on a static IP. I said that to point out that it is not even worth $6/mo to me, and combined with their deletion of logs after two weeks, having a fixed address is actually a net-negative from my perspective. So back to the real topic.. I'm definitely trying to analyze the big picture, and I've come to the conclusion that IP-as-identity is a complete red herring. I don't particularly see how it would encourage overlay networks, when the whole idea of an overlay network is to deprecate the underlaying network protocol to layer something better on top. Overlay networks work just fine over dynamic IPs, and only need a few underlying long-lived identities for rendezvous. The way I see it, the real root of the problem is protocols based on authoritative servers which place undue importance on the reliability of individual hosts, and therefore their network links and administrators. As long as we're reliant on these, then the benefits of locating them closer to the core and having them cared for by a third party is going to outweigh the downsides. |