The only question is are there standards.
I'd dispute that it's the *only* question, but anyway,
there are a lot of standards bodies out there.
I've had to think about these questions quite a lot, since
midcom certainly engendered a similar level of hostility.
I think it does matter - there's an idiom to IP networking,
and if what you do on top of IP isn't idiomatic things are
inevitably going to be clunky and, at worst, break
completely. That said, I don't think it's accurate that
the cause of all of this unidiomatic crap in the network
is the result of lack of understanding (or outright
stupidity) on the part of those doing the crap. I think
the problem is that with the commercial success of IP the
economic model has changed and the incentives have changed.
It's inevitable that there's been a technical response to
the change in incentives.
We've always behaved as if the notion that the value of
the network is a function of the number of connected nodes
is true. While it may very well be, I think we now need
to start raising the question of value to whom and
whether or not there might be other considerations. It
may be the case that my network is more valuable to me if
I have access to you, but that it's less valuable to me if
you (and you and you and you) have access to it.
Because enterprises want to protect their property and
service providers want to be able to make money with their
services they're asking for the means to make the edges of
their networks visible. They're working from a business
model that requires it. Many of the middleboxes we're
arguing about are instantiations of policy, and policies
are instantiations of business models. It seems clear to
me that if we want to restore end-to-end networking we need
to find alternate business models. Finger-shaking won't
solve the problem.
Melinda