Van the Man (Jacobson) does the Copernican Turn

great talk by the man who did not invent the internet, but probably saved it from collapse by tuning the congestion control. If you've ever used traceroute, you can thank Van.

In this talk, Van asserts that we are in need of a Copernican turn because our view of the net is based on the telco mindset. He also goes on to say that even TCP/IP is not sacred and that we should rethink the way we architect network communication to enable a more intelligent "BitTorrent" model (that's my sloppy shorthand for what is a much more elegant concept, but you will have to listen to his talk to get the details).

My only nit with his concept is that it tends to treat the whole communication model as something which can be turned into objects. I'm not sure that's entirely possible or desirable. I'm becoming more and more convinced that one of the problems we are facing is a lack of a conversation commons. I'm not pining for the old-world tea salon replicated by the Well and others; I'm thinking along the lines of what some researchers at HP referred to as the "scent-trail" but that's the subject of another post.