"And finally, I and Steve Crocker argued for a more flexible endpoint control over addressing, which got turned into a design (also by me) as "source routing" options, particularly "loose source routing". It should have been the standard address, not an option, because the idea that a federated connection of autonomous networks gets to "decide" routing in a way that can't be overridden by endpoints has made the network less scalable and more fragile than it need be. We lost because of an argument that "addresses were too big" for teletype packets, and the thought that 232 (4 billion) machines would NEVER be part of the Internet. (this also eliminated strong arguments made for longer, hierarchical addresses)."

I am glad that my kernel still has a loose source routing compile option and that my #1 UDP client (and #2 TCP client, right after djb's tcpclient) has source routing options. That client is the orginal nc.

Those options do not get much use (yet) but they represent history I do not want to forget: what is being discussed in the blog post.

Apparently people did believe this was the way routing should be done; I like that thinking. As I see it, assumptions were 1. user is not stupid and 2. user should be allowed at least some control.

Given a choice between the (theoretical) "end-to-end" internet and the (actual) third party "policy-based" routed internet, I would take the former. But what do I know? I'm just a dumb user.

Short of that, I'll settle for an overlay with source routing. UDP works well enough for making overlays, so thank you Mr. Reed.