Ask HN: Why there is only one network?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547729

by nwhnwh • 2 years ago

3 12 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am referring to the internet here and its nature.

In a free world, you should expect to see different networks, like a network that works with text only (as the internet once was), or a network that has central place for selling products with strict rules to prevent fooling the customer in any way... whatever it is, I am not arguing for any of this now... I am asking why do we have a single network?

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

For one thing the network does not know what sort of content is going over it, text or not.

For the case your e-commerce network it would cost just about as much to connect every point on the edge to that network as it does to connect to the one we have. If there were ten networks it would cost ten times as much to connect. A lot of people already think internet service is expensive.

If you wanted to have some vetted space where commerce was done at a higher level you could find some way to do that on top of the network we already have.

nwhnwh6• 2 years ago

For one thing the network does not know what sort of content is going over it, text or not.

Is it impossible to do? My goal in this post wasn't to argue for a text-only network or a network with a central e-commerce website, and wasn't to argue about technical details also, but I would like to know if a text-only network is doable or not. And even if both of these ideas are impossible or would have no value... are all other natures or types of different networks impossible and pointless?

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

It is impossible to do if the network has privacy.

In a text-only network for instance somebody could take an image file for instance and encode it as text (hex dump, base64, etc.). For that matter in the 1970s people would print “images” using text characters on a line printer and although mainframes are said to have ‘no graphics capabilities’ you will see plenty of EBCDIC art on 3270 terminals.

If you had no privacy all the above behaviors could be punished but with privacy you can’t really stop people from using a network the wrong way. This model used for networking is quite flawed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

but brings out that networking can be seen a number of distinct concerns and that the content you send over it is distinct from the transportation.

You might like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...

which would be impractical to send multimedia content over because it is low performance and would be dismissed out of hand by ‘cypherpunks’ because privacy is forbidden by law. So is using it for e-commerce.

All kinds of networks are possible, but networks have ‘network effects’ such that the value that people get out of a network is an increasing function of how many people are attached to it. Even networks compatible with the present internet such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6

because even informed people will hesitate to spend time or money on something that only has hypothetical benefits to them.

Nothing stops you from forming a network with a small number of friends except for the practical aspects such as having a physical connection. If you are close in space you can maybe use a radio link like WiFi or runs wires but if your friends are in another city your best bet is to make an

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_network

which lets you impose your own rules on top of the economically viable network we share. Since most of the cost of internet service is ‘the last mile’, a connection to your network is going to cost around $40 a month when a connection to the internet costs $50. Few people are going to decide the new network is so good that it replaces the internet so it is a matter of adding a $40 bill to get access to sending text with a few people and having access to an honest but understocked store. The cost to create that store is the same as creating a store that serves thousands or millions more users so it will either not be invested in or pass costs on the users. Such a thing is exclusive, not inclusive, by nature, although that may be the point.

sqwrell• 2 years ago

Their are many networks but they are all connected - that's the internet ... interNETwork

Each internet provider is a network, each LAN is it's own network (Local area NETWORK)

https://youtu.be/E8258JtwCUc

nwhnwh6• 2 years ago

By different network, I meant different protocols basically that will serve the puropse of the network. I don't mean connecting some nodes together using the current internet. So imagine a new service provider, you go and subscribe, and login to the network, you can't receive anything other than text. And the domains are all available at the begining, so no google no microsoft, etc. Except if you allow internetwork domains.

solardev3• 2 years ago

Well, there isn't just one network. There are many local area networks, corporate wide area networks, the academic fiber Internet2 (https://internet2.edu/network/), the cell phone networks, the plain old telephone service networks, different radio networks, etc.

There are often interconnects between some of them, and some of them do go over the public internet part of the time, but there are also parts of them that aren't accessible from the public internet.

"The" internet is a network of networks – by definition, it is the inter-network net that connects a bunch of other networks together into one interconnected mass. We have it that way because it's useful. Before the internet was popular, having small private networks that you'd connect to over the phone or T1 was common, but people naturally found it useful to be able to connect to others all around the world.

The second half of your question is more talking about applications (or protocols, if you prefer) over that network than the network itself. It's like how our roads and networks are structured... there's an interstate network of highways that connects different cities and states together, but each state can also manage its own smaller highways, and each county or city might have even smaller local roads, and of course some businesses and communities will have their own private roads that the public can't access. But through that shared road network, you can transport everything from passengers to food to goods, on everything from a semi-trucks to bicycles.

Similarly, even if we limit it to just the public internet, it's a collection of a smaller interconnected networks, and different applications and protocols can go over that shared network to do different things:

- Gopher is still around if you want a text-only network, or you can look for the odd surviving Usenet/IRC server.

- Trustworthy ecommerce: Well, that's more a market incentives & regulations question than a network one. There's no magical technology solution to ensure someone won't rip you off. But you can already buy from reputable dealers (i.e. not shady third-party Amazon vendors) and you'll probably be fine.

- There are various semi-private communities that form de facto subnets even though they're transported over the bigger internet, things like every separate blockchain, or Freenet/Hyphanet, TOR sites, or even just Discord, Whatsapp, Slack, Line, etc.

At the end of the day, it's really expensive to drag fiber across the ocean floors or launch satellites, and it would be crazy if every business, organization, and household had to run their own cables. Instead, they can all share that basic infrastructure, but have a lot of freedom as to how they use it (subject to local laws and international agreements, I guess, or else bypassing them with encryption & steganography).

nwhnwh6• 2 years ago

solardev3• 2 years ago

You can start a service like that and put it on the existing internet if you want. You can bypass DNS and make your own routing if you want. Onion and Freenet and blockchains and DHTs and content addressable systems work similarly. But nobody uses them because they're such a hassle.

Again, what you're describing is more an application or protocol, not a network necessarily. You can build it all in software on top of the existing internet.

Ask HN: Why there is only one network?

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