50 Years of Networking#

Geoff Huston – APNIC

• Why: Not a technique talk — a direction-of-field argument from one of the Internet's longest-running observers, and the argument lands squarely on questions this PM cares about (openness, centralization, what the AI build-out means).
• What: Why Ethernet won (open, cheap, simple, self-operating, and — crucially — an invariant frame format that preserved capital across 50 years of speed and medium changes); IP as "large-scale Ethernet" pushing complexity to the edge. Then the uncomfortable present: name-based service delivery has replaced hop-by-hop address networking, the Internet's "core" is now private CDN feeder systems, and transit is dead. The alternate tomorrow: if Moore's Law stalls, the AI build-out looks like a return to centralized, expensive, specialized compute — and Huston's real warning is the resurgence of closed, black-box platforms whose applications deliberately avoid standard open technologies, making open standards the endangered species.
• How: Historical analysis and argument; no mechanism to evaluate.
• Where applicable: Speculative and big-picture, but a useful stress test for any strategy that assumes the next 50 years look like the last 50.