A few of the bloggers writing so well about the role of individual and community take Doc and me to task (or, better, to school) for portraying the Internet as a world of ends when in fact those ends are joined in webs of personal connection.

Of course that’s right. And since Doc is the “Web is a conversation” guy and I’m the “Small pieces loosely joined” guy, we’re on record as agreeing with that insight. So why do we misleadingly talk about “ends” in World of Ends? Good question…

First, that’s the language in the paper from which we took the article’s main insight: “End-to-End Arguments...” Second, Doc and I wanted to talk about the Internet’s architecture so that we could make the quasi-factual claim that boneheaded businesses and regulators are just plain wrong in their understanding; we didn’t want to focus in this article on all the good things that come out of that architecture. Third, we liked the echo of “ends” vs. “means” as in Kant’s Kingdom of Ends.

But, yes, absolutely and definitely, the value of the Internet is the groups it allows. In fact, point #7 is called “The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends” and says in the first paragraph: “…when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren?t endpoints at all. ” There’s much much more to be said about this. Books and generations worth. But that wasn’t the point of “World of Ends.”

I find David Reed’s apparent development on this issue interesting. He was one of the authors of the End-to-End argument. Thinking about the Net purely as a set of isolated ends leads to Metcalfe’s Law that the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of nodes. This works fine for the telephone network. But, Reed realized, it seriously underestimates the value of a network where groups can form. So, Reed’s Law accounts for the exponential increase in the number of possible groups each additional node causes, resulting in a much steeper curve than Metcalfe’s. (I wrote about this here.)

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