At the end of the 19th century the logician C.S. Peirce coined the term "fallibilism" for the "... the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy". In terms of scientific practice, this means we are obliged to reexamine the assumptions, the evidence, and the arguments for conclusions that subsequent experience has cast into doubt. In this paper we examine an assumption that underpinned the development of the Internet architecture, namely that a loosely synchronous point-to-point datagram delivery service could adequately meet the needs of all network applications, including those which deliver content and services to a mass audience at global scale. We examine how the inability of the Networking community to provide a public and affordable mechanism to support such asynchronous point-to-multipoint applications led to the development of private overlay infrastructure, namely CDNs and Cloud networks, whose architecture stands at odds with the Open Data Networking goals of the early Internet advocates. We argue that the contradiction between those initial goals and the monopolistic commercial imperatives of hypergiant overlay infrastructure operators is an important reason for the apparent contradiction posed by the negative impact of their most profitable applications (e.g., social media) and strategies (e.g., targeted advertisement). We propose that, following the prescription of Peirce, we can only resolve this contradiction by reconsidering some of our deeply held assumptions.

翻译：19世纪末，逻辑学家C.S.皮尔士提出了“可错论”（fallibilism）这一术语，用以描述“我们的知识绝非绝对，而总是仿佛悬浮于不确定性与非决定性的连续体之中”的学说。在科学实践层面，这意味着我们有义务重新审视那些已被后续经验质疑的结论所依据的假设、证据和论证。本文探讨了支撑互联网架构发展的一项假设，即：一种松散同步的点对点数据报传递服务足以满足所有网络应用的需求，包括那些为全球范围内的大众提供内容与服务的应用。我们考察了网络界未能提供一种公共且可负担的机制来支持此类异步点对多点应用，是如何导致私有覆盖网络基础设施（即CDN和云网络）发展的，而这类基础设施的架构与早期互联网倡导者所追求的开放数据网络目标背道而驰。我们认为，这些初始目标与超大型覆盖网络运营商的垄断性商业诉求之间的矛盾，是其最盈利的应用（如社交媒体）和策略（如定向广告）带来负面影响这一明显悖论的重要原因。我们提出，遵循皮尔士的处方，只有重新审视我们一些根深蒂固的假设，才能解决这一矛盾。