> If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.
Wow, this is so wrong I am annoyed by it. The Internet is not "anonymous" (it really isn't, for the most part) because someone designed it that way. You can read the design rules set out by DARPA and see that they were concerned about infrastructure above all else [1]. The fundamental goal was the multiplexing of many different networks. The top three secondary goals were:
1. Network resilience
2. Multiple communication types
3. Support for different network types
Anonymity was not part of the design of the Internet--period.
Wow, this is so wrong I am annoyed by it. The Internet is not "anonymous" (it really isn't, for the most part) because someone designed it that way. You can read the design rules set out by DARPA and see that they were concerned about infrastructure above all else [1]. The fundamental goal was the multiplexing of many different networks. The top three secondary goals were:
1. Network resilience 2. Multiple communication types 3. Support for different network types
Anonymity was not part of the design of the Internet--period.
[1] http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf