Engineering a Principle

Abstract

The term 'end-to-end' has become a familiar characterization of the architecture of the Internet, not only in engineering discourse, but in contexts as varied as political manifestos, commercial promotions, and legal arguments. Its ubiquity and opacity cloak the complexity of the technology it describes, and stand in for a richer controversy about the details of network design. This essay considers the appearance, in the 1970s, of the term 'end-to-end' in computer science discourse, and how the term became a point of contention within disputes about how to build a packet-switched network. I argue that the resolution of some of those disputes depended on the transformation of the term from descriptor to 'principle'. This transformation attempted to close specific design debates, and, in the process, made the term dramatically more useful in those discourses beyond engineering that eventually took a keen interest in the design of digital communication networks. The term, drawn from common parlance and given not only meaning but conviction, was shaped and polished so as to be mobile. As such, it actively managed and aligned disparate structural agendas, and has had subtle consequences for how the Internet has been understood, sold, legislated, and even re-designed.

Mediated democracy – Linking digital technology to political agency

“…This reinterpretation included a translation of the internet's operational principles into a political language of liberation and decentralisation. As Gillespie (2006) shows in detail with regard to the end-to-end principle, users and academic observers contributed in a discursive way to defining what the internet is and is not. The political reformulation of the end-to-end principle as individual empowerment radiated an "aura of populist participation, democratic egalitarianism, openness (…) and inclusiveness" (Gillespie, 2006, p. 445).…”

Network Neutrality and the Need for a Technological Turn in Internet Scholarship

“…Moreover, despite the universal recognition of the need to accommodate technical concepts such as network security and congestion management, many people involved in the debate have only the barest notion of how the Internet manages security and congestion. At the same time, the lack of knowledge has allowed advocates to recast pragmatic engineering concepts as supposedly inviolable architectural principles, effectively imbuing certain types of political advocacy with a false sense of scientific legitimacy (Blumenthal 2002;Gillespie 2006). …”