Re: Past one terabit/second on fiber

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 11:08 PM 5/15/96, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:
>        One problem with the development of such high-end technologies is that
>they tend to increase economies of scale to the point where it's impractical to
>have anything but a monopoly or ogliopoly. As well as concerns about the degree
>of control such an organization may be able to exert in and of itself (acting
>like a government, in essence), there's also that such an organization is
>easier to pressure than a lot of small providers. Anyone have a suggested
>solution, or reasons that I shouldn't be so worried?

Personally, I'm not terribly worried by such concentrations (for reasons
I'll mention at the end).

But I'll note that Eric Fair's recent post described the far-from-geodesic
traffic situation, with a relatively small number of "super-nodes" (like
"MAE-West" and her sisters) handling huge fractions of traffic. These
super-nodes are obvious points of attack (in the nuclear war--or
terrorist--scenario oft-cited as the motivation for packet-switching) and
lessen the "geodesic" nature of the Net.

Economies of scale may be pushing us away from the "full-distributed"
geodesic nature toward super-nodes.

The reason I am not really too worried is that encryption and remailers
allow a kind of "meta-geodesic" network to be (virtually) layered on top of
the physical network.

(In the famous network hierarchy of network levels, it seems we can add a
new level.)

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
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