Internet as a 'Hostile Overlay'

Steve Reeding, one of the creators of IPv6, shares his crucial insight on how some networks adapt, survive, and impose themselves:

"I have a different take on that. Yes, a lot of people were dissing tunnels yesterday. I'm actually a big fan of tunnels. I think the way the IPv4 Internet was built originally was basically by tunneling over the phone system. Ignore, you know, getting leased lines, putting computers on the end, building a network with no cooperation at all from the phone company. In fact, I once saw a phone company memo that referred to the Internet as a 'hostile overlay'. You know, and we basically, you know, demolished their billing plans and everything, and built this network in spite of the desires of the carriers. And, as I see the IPv4 Internet getting more and more like the phone company, I thought one way to deploy IPv6 is basically tunnel over all that junk. Iterate the same thing again. And I gather, you know, some people, you know, who are concerned about this are looking at other ways of sort evolving the Internet, where you, you know, tunnel over HTTP or whatever you have to do to basically get over all that cruft and build a new network on top of it. So that, to me, was one possible way, you know, as the IPv4 Internet rotted the underneath. We would tunnel over it and then we would throw away the rotted bits and replace them with wires."