At 11:08 PM 5/15/96, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:

One problem with the development of such high-end technologies is that they tend to increase economies of scale to the point where it's impractical to have anything but a monopoly or ogliopoly. As well as concerns about the degree of control such an organization may be able to exert in and of itself (acting like a government, in essence), there's also that such an organization is easier to pressure than a lot of small providers. Anyone have a suggested solution, or reasons that I shouldn't be so worried?

Personally, I'm not terribly worried by such concentrations (for reasons I'll mention at the end). But I'll note that Eric Fair's recent post described the far-from-geodesic traffic situation, with a relatively small number of "super-nodes" (like "MAE-West" and her sisters) handling huge fractions of traffic. These super-nodes are obvious points of attack (in the nuclear war--or terrorist--scenario oft-cited as the motivation for packet-switching) and lessen the "geodesic" nature of the Net. Economies of scale may be pushing us away from the "full-distributed" geodesic nature toward super-nodes. The reason I am not really too worried is that encryption and remailers allow a kind of "meta-geodesic" network to be (virtually) layered on top of the physical network. (In the famous network hierarchy of network levels, it seems we can add a new level.) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."