CircleID

The marketing effort that has been invested in this report is impressive. A friend of mine who has no Internet-specific expertise (although interested in technology generally) heard about it on the radio here in Australia and asked me if I knew of it. But the fact that the report is being sold as a product makes it intrinsically less valuable to me. Not only can I not afford to buy it (as a PhD student), I wouldn't consider it very valuable if I were given a complimentary copy, since the limited readership reduces the amount of intelligent discussion available on it.

To the extent that the report itself is publicly available (in summary form above and executive summary on their website) I find it lacking. Many of the issues over which alarm bells are raised are not news at all, but well known to readers of CircleID. Indeed, they are, by and large, the very reason why we are gathered here. Many of the issues will be news only to the chronically out-of-touch.

To the extent that solutions are hinted at in the summary, they are controversial. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but I'm disturbed by the overall tone in which the solutions are expressed: namely, that the urgency of the situation means unpopular decisions must be made and more or less enforced on the Internet at large by fiat, for the benefit of all concerned. This was ever the technique of the despot: manufacture a crisis, and offer to take the reins temporarily so that the community may be guided safely through.

A cynical reading of the recommendations in the executive summary reveals a sinister plot to establish the "Internet Mark 2" empire in the time frame of three to seven years, at which point the technical and political decisions will be safely out of the hands of inept volunteers, and securely in the hands of the new elite, whoever they may be. Silly though this interpretation is, it fits the facts. I don't actually believe it to be their agenda, but their tone makes it clear that they aren't looking for friends in the rank and file of the IETF.

Lastly certain parts of the report (in summary form) seem just plain disingenuous. I refer particularly to the alleged unsuitability of the Internet for financial transactions, above. There may be good reasons why the Internet is unsuited for certain kinds of transaction, but none are presented here. The suggestion that TCP is non-deterministic is misleading: TCP provides a reliable stream-oriented connection between endpoints over an unreliable datagram substrate (IP). All the criticisms aimed at "TCP/IP" in the Adamson quotation actually refer only to raw IP.

The very idea of a "deterministic network", suggested as a design option, is fantasy: networks in the real world suffer from non-deterministic real-world inconveniences, like back-hoes severing cables, or spontaneously combusting switches. A TCP/IP session is more likely to survive such a real-world inconvenience (if an alternate route is available) relative to a purely circuit-switched network (which is my best guess as to what they mean by "deterministic") precisely because TCP is designed to shield the application from a certain degree of real-world unreliability. Perhaps they meant deterministic with regards to response times, but the relevance of that to the issue at hand is not obvious.

Thus, the criticism of TCP/IP seems nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Furthermore, they fail to explain how the issues raised are at all relevant to financial transactions. By this stage, I'm starting to feel that they take me for some kind of sucker.

I could go on, but I doubt it would be fruitful. As someone who is actively concerned with the very real problems we face on the Internet today, I was hoping for rather more out of the time I invested in reading this article and the executive summary. My final impression is that the report was intended to be sufficiently sensational that a profitably large number of CEOs would buy it and pass it on to their technical staff with a sticky note saying, "do we need to be concerned about this stuff?" If the report is at all motivated by a sincere (even if misguided) wish to make the Internet a better place, I failed to pick up on it.

Harsh judgement, I know, but there you have it.