Sounds screwy, but it's true. If you optimize a network for one type of application, you de-optimize it for others. For example, if you let the network give priority to voice or video data on the grounds that they need to arrive faster, you are telling other applications that they will have to wait. And as soon as you do that, you have turned the Net from something simple for everybody into something complicated for just one purpose. It isn't the Internet anymore.
Queuing conditions determine the nature of the network. Consider the social nature of a network that provides equal access for data for the blind, for data for the deaf. Some of those preoccupations will spill over into the built environment.
It is also worth remembering that access to data is also about the occasion for gift giving; it is about valuing what is offered. And that in turn is a valuing of the person who offers.
And so for day 470
27.03.2008