on the 'Rethinking the design of the Internet: 2 The end to end arguments vs. the brave new world'

The author of the paper reiterates the design principles that have been guiding the development of the Internet up to the present, called end-to-end arguments. End to end arguments in the context of the Internet, follow the notion of making the functions of the lower layers of the Internet infrastructure as simple as possible. Any application-specific features should be pulled out of the core infrastructure and should be implemented at the end systems instead. It proceeds by arguing that these design principles have been the key driving factor of the advances and innovations that the Internet has been experiencing since its early days. This position paper was written in the face of increasing interests of third parties i.e. private entities, governments, demanding the inclusion of new features which would allow more “better” mechanisms for providing security, privacy, accountability, etc. The paper cited a situation wherein implementing “eavesdropping” mechanism at the lower level of the infrastructure would still proved useless, after the fact, that end to end points of the communication are free to apply any available mechanism i.e. encryption, etc., to the messages being exchanged. Instead of providing the benefits one expected from it, it would only add complexity to the core network which in turn would increase the cost of deploying new applications to the Internet.