Telepocalypse

OPINION://End-to-end is a political statement

End-to-end isn’t just a technical phenomenon of the network and application architecture. It is a philosophy about value creation and efficient allocation of economic resources to meet user needs. It is also deeply political. It effectively states that the users are in control, even if the original paper on end-to-end arguments casts it entirely in technical terms:

End-to-end arguments are a kind of “Occam’s razor” when it comes to choosing the functions to be provided in a communication subsystem.

Indeed the original paper fails to point out an important fact: the reason all the examples given support keeping functionality in the upper layers of the application stack at the end points isn’t because it makes those applications more technically efficient per se. Instead, it is because the user places value on certain features (reliable delivery of voicemail, secure file transfer). It is the economic desire that then drives the need to create an efficient architecture for their delivery.

There is a subtle difference between this and a pure technical efficiency argument. It says that the user should decide what the valued functionality of the system is, not the product development department of a telco or network vendor. Hence the user needs to express those desires in the only way they can: by control of the handware and software at the end points. Hence the success of companies like Nokia and Microsoft, and the relative decline of the Lucents and Suns (sorry, “the computer is still the just the computer”).

The effect of an “intelligent network” above the IP layer to constrain, inhibit or degrade application functionality is secondary to removing friction in turning user need into usable application. The Internet is successful because of its economic attributes, which it inherits from its technical design. As many a dead dotcom attests, technical efficiency at delivering something customers don’t value does not equate to long-term success.

A recent thread between some of the bloggerati highlights the political nature of the argument:

Dave Winer asserts:

… I would love to see their [US presidential] candidates make an impassioned plea to keep the Internet free of interference from the entertainment industry. I would welcome this for two reasons.

1. First, I’m part of a constituency, like many others, who are looking for a candidate to vote for who supports our primary issue. Nothing unusual about that, easy to understand.

2. But as important, it would signal that the candidate is not beholden to the media companies. I would happily give money to candidates for ads that warn that the media industry is trying to rob us of our future, and explains how important it is to protect the independence of the Internet. Use the media industry channels to undermine their efforts to the control channels they don’t own, yet.

Via Doc Searls comes this partial retort from Mitch Ratcliffe

My take on this issue of making the Net my primary issue is that this would be both counter-productive and destructive to the Net as a thing, since it puts the definition of the Net into the political domain when what is really at stake is a series of procedural decisions about the flow of information.

Well, not really. Soon, all your television (or whatever comes after TV is Nettified) will flow over the Internet. All your radio. All your music. Every magazine you read will be downloaded, customized and printed locally. Every snippet of news. Every photo you share.

Ultimately, if you can’t be there in person, or whistle really well, then every interaction you have with the outside world will flow over the Internet. Every idea you send or receive.

And you are part of this world. As they say, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. You are part of history; there is no opt-out. Inaction is not an absence of action, merely an abdication of your responsibility: where were you Daddy when the Internet was no longer free?

Statements about who controls what economic resources are political. Statements about who controls the flow of ideas and criticism are political. End-to-end is a political philosophy. Don’t fool yourselves that it is otherwise.