The transition in which we gave up sender responsibility is long
past, was quite protracted (roughly, I'd say, Sep 1993 through Oct
1998), and was largely unrecognized at the time (and thus the
question of benefits gained in return did not arise).
Would you expand a little more on that, please? I don't follow it.
I picked those months as the September that never ended for the
beginning and Jon Postel's death for the end.
The former started the flood that turned the net from a responsible
place populated (entirely, or close enough that that's an operation
approximation) by people who shared a smooth-running net as a common
goal into what we have today, where such people are an idealistic,
tiny, and largely impotent minority.
The latter is as close as I've found to a watershed event for the
transition from Internet governance with a well-run net as the primary
motivation at the top of the pyramid to Internet governance with profit
as the primary motivation at the top of the pyramid. (Yes, I'm
convinced the latter is basically what we have today. I've heard of at
least one TLD suggestion being turned down because the proposed rules
for it wouldn't allow large numbers of domain registrations - which was
actually the whole point, but because there wasn't a high-profit
business model behind it it was rejected. This also explains, though
not excuses, the mismatch between authority and responsibility;
offering authority without responsibility draws lots more customers.)
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