Kevin Guidry wrote:
TCP/IP as the underlying protocol of the majority of the Internet is a historical accident. Other protocols that provided the same functionality could just as easily been used. Well, there were massive efforts underway around the same time in the ITU and related venues to establish X.400 as the major standard for interconnecting different networks. It would have been a different Inter-Network for sure. The domain layer and the transport layer were identical, so your email address was also used for routing. It would have been technically impossible to use the TLD "tv" outside Tuvalu. And the network topology with gateways at the national borders resembled the multilateral political model of the ITU/UN culture.
In the end, the Internet (as we know it) won over the tightly-controlled X.400 network. Which is not an accident, but happened for various reasons, the major one being that X.400 was tightly controlled, I guess.
my LAN at home is still essentially the same despite moving from Ethernet over Cat5 to 802.11g over the air. I bet it is not the same. It probably has changed the routines of using it, as well as security and other considerations, like sharing it with the neighbors.
we are replacing one of the core protocols used on the Internet with another protocol but it's still going to be the Internet. Or it is not, depending on where you look. The Internet we know is already not there anymore (if it ever has been) in China, Saudi-Arabia, and even some places in Germany, where Nazi websites are filtered by the ISPs. And look at the Net Neutrality debate in the US. If you mean "any data network that allows me to connect to others around the world", then we will always have some "Internet", and we had it before with earlier services. But then X.400 also was an "Internet". But it will have different features.
I think the debate is becoming a bit tiring. It is up to us how we define the "Internet", depending on our research purposes. We can also call it "Bill" if we want. More important is how the definition helps us doing research ojn specific aspects of the beast. Instead of having this "no, my definition is more right than yours" go on forever, it would be more helpful to list the different research strands and theories and try to come up with definitions of "the Internet" from the different perspectives. That would be much more fruitful to my understanding. From a political science point of view, I would say: The debate over net neutrality shows very nicely that part of the political struggle over what kind of network we want is defining the "Internet". Best, Ralf -- ------------------------------------------------------------ Dipl. Pol. Ralf Bendrath University of Bremen Collaborative Research Center "Transformations of the State" Linzer Str. 9a, D-28359 Bremen, Germany Tel. +49 (421) 218-8735 Fax +49 (421) 218-8721 official http://www.sfb597.uni-bremen.de/homepages/bendrath personal http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath blog http://bendrath.blogspot.com