--- Sue Cranmer <sue@jcranmer.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
Interesting discussion. How do aiorlisters then see the comparison between the the 'Internet' or 'internet' and the 'telephone'?
The Internet, it seems to me, is a particular thing: it's the network that runs IP and uses the ICANN-administered addressing system and all the rest of it. The telephone is a class of things: it's a kind of device that we plug into the wall, because we want connectivity to a particular network. To the extent a mobile phone or cell phone gets to be a "telephone", I guess that telephone is a broader class of devices than that. Either way. many of us have several telephones. Few of us have several internets. Noone has more than one of the Internet.
The point is that there is a significant difference in the evolution of telephone and the Internet. There were always multiple telephone (and telegraph) networks; there was no time where there was one telephone network named The Telephone network.
I don't know. Isn't the PSTN, The Telephone Network? Its one-ness federates a heterogeneity much in the way the Internet does: a single network because end-to-end (voice) connectivity bound by a common addressing system (ITU E.164, rather than ICANN DNS). In that sense agreement to coordinate to CCIT/CCITT/ITU-T has played a similar role in maintaining The Telephone Network (i.e. PSTN) as coordinating to IAB&IETF&Postel/ICANN has helped maintain an Internet. Sometimes the PSTN and the Internet overlap, as when E.164-numbered phone calls are terminated to Voice-over-Internet connection. They're not mirror images of one another: the Internet disaggregates some of the layers that the PSTN binds tightly together. But they're each a network, for remarkably similar meanings of "network". cheers Bram