This memo asks a question. It does not specify a standard of any kind, because the question is prior to all standards. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. That was always the best part.
The Internet grew in part through numbered memos called Requests for Comments. In April 1969, Steve Crocker’s RFC 1, “Host Software,” set out tentative agreements and open questions. Very little was firm. Reactions were expected.
It is a good way to begin something large.
The name survived after the network stopped being small enough for everyone involved to know one another. Somewhere between RFC 1 and the present day, the network scaled its answers a billionfold and quietly stopped asking the question underneath them all.
This document requests comment on that question:
What is the Internet for?
RFC 2119 uses MUST, SHOULD and MAY to distinguish levels of technical requirement. This fictional memo borrows the capitals to ask what we owe one another. That part is ours, not the standard’s.
A few things people found to do with a connection:
| 1969 | The first ARPANET message from UCLA to SRI was meant to say LOGIN. The system crashed after LO. Two letters were enough to begin a very long conversation. |
|---|---|
| 1971 | Ray Tomlinson sent email between computers sitting beside one another. Distance could come later. |
| 1980s | Usenet carried conversations about science fiction, cooking, jokes and the people having them. |
| 1993 | A camera watching a Cambridge coffee pot became available on the Web. It had already been saving colleagues a wasted trip since 1991. |
| Today | A new baby. A repair explained. Someone saying they got home safely. |
In their end-to-end argument, first presented in 1981, Jerome Saltzer, David Reed and David Clark argued that some functions need the knowledge available at a system’s endpoints to work completely and correctly. Checks inside the network may still help, but they do not always replace the checks at the ends.
The network was built that way. TCP has moved love letters, lab results, revolutions and spam with perfect equanimity, because the middle was engineered not to know what it carries.
What each layer of that middle can know:
The 1981 argument does not prove anything about meaning. It concerns where functions belong in a network. It does leave an architectural coincidence that is difficult to ignore: the middle transports; the ends interpret.
You are an end.
payload: 49 27 6d 20 68 65 72 65 2e
decoded: "I'm here."
Every checksum passed. Every byte arrived, in order, to the correct recipient, authenticated, decrypted. Every device involved did exactly what it was designed to do.
What does it mean?
sent from the train platform sent after the operation sent from outside the house sent after six months of silence sent by the person you were waiting for
Same bytes.
A local demonstration. Nothing typed here leaves this page.
Suppose the message is: I miss you.
a finger touches glass voltage changes bits radio fibre routers more voltage pixels photons a retina neural activity
Every physical event in that chain can be accounted for. At no point can an engineer point and say: there, that is the missing. The person at the other end may cry.
Did the meaning travel? Or did something happen at the other end? If it happened there, was it the same meaning?
A question left unasked does not remain unanswered. It gets answered by default, by whoever benefits from the default. The primary vulnerability introduced by this memo's long absence is that "what is the Internet for?" was quietly resolved, at scale, by parties whose honest answer was "for holding your attention until the next quarter."
A system that cannot determine meaning can nevertheless influence the conditions under which meaning is made. A network need not understand a conversation to decide which conversations are easy to have. This is a considerable amount of power.
Implementers, and every person online is one, SHOULD treat any purpose they did not choose as unverified input.
No registry for meaning is known to exist.
Creation of one is not recommended.
In the tradition of the founding documents, this memo is unfinished on purpose. The question is reopened; the comment period never closes. Responses need not be filed anywhere.
A response looks like this: the next thing you build, send, teach, or repair through the wire, on purpose, for someone.
You an endpoint (present location) comments to: everyone you love
A book does not understand its words.
Air does not understand a voice.
A photograph does not remember the person in it.
And yet something arrives.
Every layer below you can explain how the message arrived. None can explain why it mattered.
Why anything should mean anything at all is outside the scope of this memo.
It does anyway.
Request for Comments.