[e2e] a means to an end

[David P. Reed]

Noel's ideas were not tried.  They were (essentially) shouted down or 
ignored, take your pick.  There is a lot of merit in those ideas, and 
perhaps they should be resurrected.  The one fear I personally have is 
that the techniques he described have the risk of creating 
non-interconnected "walled gardens" overlaid on the network over 
networks.  That's why I talked about competing for *public* delivery and 
using the same common address space.

Pekka Nikander wrote:
>> If [path selection], some previous work I did tried to bring in the 
>> concept of
>> allowing competing path-selection algorithms. The design did share a 
>> single
>> underlying database of information about the network between them (of
>> connectivity), but it seemed to me that that level of commonality didn't
>> unduly burden the ability to go different ways, and having that common
>> underlying database had advantages that offset its disadvantages. I know
>> there is a position that there are some connectivity models which 
>> can't be
>> represented in the model we picked (a graph), but the architecture 
>> did allow
>> non-graph connectivity models in localized areas, and I still think 
>> that for
>> the overall representation of the global network, the graph model is 
>> best.
>
> And what did you learn?  What are the tussles?  Is it realistic for
> different players to trust each other with enough of information so
> that useful-enough graph approximations can be formed?  Are there
> situations where one can benefit too much from lying to the peers?
>
> --Pekka
>
>