platforms, from urban street grids to Google, and so to consider their common operations, some abstraction is necessary. Part of their alterity to normal public and private operations is the apparently paradoxical way that they standardize …system that would support discrete circuits between one sender and receiver, like older telephony networks, versus many computing companies, such as IBM, which lobbied hard for packet switching technologies that could treat all messages (e.…Both OSI and TCP/IP are packet switching models, but for better or worse, the seven-layer OSI model that Bachmann described never really took off. The simplified TCP/IP four-layer model described by Cerf’s group did get traction, and based …
Vint Cerf
engineer · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Vint Cerf was one of the principal architects of TCP/IP, the four-layer packet-switching protocol model that became the foundational infrastructure of the Internet rather than the competing seven-layer OSI model. The course uses him to illustrate how technical standards—ostensibly neutral design choices—become dominant forces that structure digital platforms and transactions, embedding particular assumptions about modularity and data recombination into the systems that now mediate social and economic life. His work exemplifies the critical insight that infrastructural decisions made by small groups of engineers have outsized effects on what kinds of networks, and therefore what kinds of society, become possible.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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