The Myth of End-to-End Myths

From the myth-bashing department: Reason has an interview with Larry Lessig. In this interview, he repeats his arguments from his book, The Future of Ideas, concerning his views on the importance of the "end-to-end design principle", repeating a common mantra of Internet techies, who argue that the Internet is obviously a superior design to the telephone network because "the intelligence is at the end nodes and not inside the network". These theories are blindly parroted and even applied to cyber-political theory, typically as variations of David S. Isenberg's stupid network theme. Showing that the populist view often does not bear scrutiny, in this posting back in March 2000 on the Cybertelecom-L mailing list (no archives), Fred Goldstein takes the opposite view and argues convincingly, that on the contrary, "The telephone network has even more content-neutrality than the Internet, because as a circuit-switched network, it has zero visibility of the bearer channels. Once the call's set up, bits is bits. No firewalls, censorware, caches, or other content-invasive intermediaries a la the Internet as people tend to see it nowadays. Thus the amount of intelligence in the Internet's switches (routers) is many orders of magnitude above what goes into a telephone switch, even a huge one."

Whoops, so much for the stupid network theory...

8:27:32 PM    Google It!