Net Nard / The Parts That Must Be Coordinated

Centralise The Least, Leave The Rest Alone

A consistent principle runs through the coordinated functions: keep them as narrow as the problem allows and no narrower.

Look at what is coordinated and what is not, and a pattern appears. Names are coordinated because uniqueness demands it. Identifiers are allocated because collisions would otherwise be unavoidable. Technical conventions are agreed because networks that disagreed about them could not exchange traffic at all. Almost everything else is left to whoever owns the equipment: what capacity to build, what to charge, what services to offer, what customers to accept, what internal arrangements to use. The coordinated set is small and the uncoordinated set is enormous.

This is not accidental frugality, it reflects a working principle. Anything placed under central coordination becomes a point where a single decision affects everybody, which is useful when a single decision is genuinely required and dangerous when it is not. It also becomes a point that parties will lobby, capture or contest, because whoever influences it influences the whole. Keeping the coordinated set minimal limits both the fragility and the political pressure, at the cost of accepting inconsistency everywhere else.

The cost is real and should not be glossed over. Because so little is coordinated, the experience of using the internet varies enormously depending on which networks you happen to depend on, and there is no authority to appeal to about the parts you find inadequate. Someone who wants a uniform standard of service across the whole cannot get it from this design, and saying so is not an attack on the design. It is simply the trade that was made: uniformity was given up in exchange for the ability to grow and adapt without permission.