RFC 1687 (rfc1687) - Page 3 of 13

A Large Corporate User's View of IPng

RFC 1687         A Large Corporate User's View of IPng       August 1994


The Internet and TCP/IP Protocols are not Identical

   The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) community closely
   associates TCP/IP protocols with the Internet.  In many cases it is
   difficult to discern from the IETF perspective where the world-wide
   Internet infrastructure ends and the services of the TCP/IP Protocol
   Suite begin -- they are not always distinguishable from each other.
   Historically they both stem from the same roots:  DARPA was the
   creator of TCP/IP and of the seminal "Internet".  The services
   provided by the Internet have been generally realized by the "TCP/IP
   protocol family".  The Internet has, in turn, become a primary
   vehicle for the definition, development, and transmission of the
   various TCP/IP protocols in their various stages of maturity.  Thus,
   the IETF community has a mindset which assumes that there is a strong
   symbiotic relationship between the two.

   End users do not share this assumption -- despite the fact that many
   end users have widely deployed TCP/IP protocols and extensively use
   the Internet.  It is important for the IETF community to realize,
   however, that TCP/IP protocols and the Internet are generally viewed
   to be two quite dissimilar things by the large end user.  That is,
   while the Internet may be a partial selling point for some TCP/IP
   purchases, it is rarely even a primary motivation for the majority of
   purchases.  Many end users, in fact, have sizable TCP/IP deployments
   with no Internet connectivity at all.  Thus, many end users view the
   relationship between the Internet and TCP/IP protocols to be tenuous
   at best.

   More importantly, many corporations have made substantial investments
   in (non-Internet) external communications infrastructures.  A variety
   of reasons account for this including the fact that until recently
   the Internet was excluded from the bilateral agreements and
   international tariffs necessary for international commerce.  In any
   case, end users today are not (in the general case) dependent upon
   the Internet to support their business processes.  [Note: the
   previous sentence does not deny that many Fortune 100 employees (such
   as the author) are directly dependent upon the Internet to fulfill
   their job responsibilities: The Internet has become an invaluable
   tool for many corporations' "research and education" activities.
   However, it is rarely used today for activities which directly affect
   the corporations' financial "bottom line":  commerce.]  By contrast,
   large End Users with extensive internal TCP/IP deployments may
   perhaps view TCP/IP technology to be critically important to their
   corporation's core business processes.







Fleischman