decades ago, the telco has told the Federal Communications Commission, and is “fully consistent” with that body’s standards-making discussions.

Baloney, insists the IETF’s current chairman. “AT&T’s characterization is misleading,” Russ Housley told National Journal several days later. “IETF prioritization technology is geared toward letting network users indicate how they want network providers to handle their traffic, and there is no implication in the IETF about payment based on any prioritization.”

Obviously this is a hot historical debate, given that limiting content prioritization is central to the FCC’s proposed net neutrality rules, as well as the Google/Verizon open Internet manifesto. AT&T and various reform groups have been going at it for weeks over the issue.

So who is right here? And what is this DiffServ talk anyway?

One protocol to rule them all

When most people think of inventing, they usually conjure up big corporate labs with lots of equipment or, in earlier times, tinkerers at their basement tables. One of the more interesting aspects of internet history is how much of the ‘Net was invented at meetings — literally people in nice little rooms sitting around talking, with someone taking notes.

By 1973, some of the creators of the ARPANET held one of these gatherings at Stanford University, and they were worried. There were already 15 “nodes” in the network, mostly university based extensions. Each was busy experimenting with their own little terminal computer offshoot subnetworks. How would this ever-expanding octopus retain a single, coherent nervous system?

The answer they came up with was TCP—Transfer Control Protocol. The P-word is borrowed from diplomacy. Protocols are basically agreed upon standards for how information will be exchanged. TCP would be the master — adopted by all ARPANET connectors.

As summarized by internet historian Janet Abbate, TCP “did much more than just set up a connection between two hosts: it verified the safe arrival of packets using acknowledgments, compensated for errors by re-transmitting lost or damaged packets, and” — pay attention — “controlled the rate of data flow between the hosts by limiting the number of packets in transit.”

As the discussions continued through 1978, critics argued that TCP as originally envisioned required all portions of the network to do too much work. So they added another: Internet Protocol, which would just move packets from node to node — all of them labeled with numeric IP addresses.

IP functions would be performed on packet routing “gateway” machines. TCP would perform the verification tasks on hosts. Together, they would be known as TCP/IP.

“We wanted to have a common protocol and a common address space so that you couldn’t tell, to first order, that you were actually talking through all these different kinds of nets,” recalled internet pioneer Vinton Cerf.

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Authors: Matthew Lasar

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