

Internet as a 'Hostile Overlay' - StephenFalken
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwRVNwa6nJc#t=11m07s

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StephenFalken
Steve Reeding, one of the creators of IPv6, shares his crucial insight on how
some networks adapt, survive, and impose themselves:

"I have a different take on that. Yes, a lot of people were dissing tunnels
yesterday. I'm actually a big fan of tunnels. I think the way the IPv4
Internet was built originally was basically by tunneling over the phone
system. Ignore, you know, getting leased lines, putting computers on the end,
building a network with no cooperation at all from the phone company. In fact,
I once saw a phone company memo that referred to the Internet as a 'hostile
overlay'. You know, and we basically, you know, demolished their billing plans
and everything, and built this network in spite of the desires of the
carriers. And, as I see the IPv4 Internet getting more and more like the phone
company, I thought one way to deploy IPv6 is basically tunnel over all that
junk. Iterate the same thing again. And I gather, you know, some people, you
know, who are concerned about this are looking at other ways of sort evolving
the Internet, where you, you know, tunnel over HTTP or whatever you have to do
to basically get over all that cruft and build a new network on top of it. So
that, to me, was one possible way, you know, as the IPv4 Internet rotted the
underneath. We would tunnel over it and then we would throw away the rotted
bits and replace them with wires."

