The architecture of a network can have important implications for the nature of goods available. For instance, the Internet provides access to an incredibly diverse array of information sources, from personal home pages to fully searchable and professionally managed archives. We believe that the salient feature that drives the diversity of the Internet is that the network provides only bit transportation services; it is up to the end hosts to construct higher-level applications on top of this raw transport service. This architecture has the great advantage that it need not be modified as new applications arise, because applications are implemented entirely at the end hosts and no centralized authority needs to approve such implementations. We call such an architecture complete blind.
There are also a wide variety of services available via 900 numbers on the phone network. In this case the network is application-aware (voice telephony circuits) but content-blind. In comparison, the offerings of cable television, which is content-aware, are rather limited in scope. To what extent do these differences reflect the effect of architecture on the provision of content? [MacKie-Mason et al. 1995b] explore this question, focusing on opportunities to price discriminate, service provider liability, the costs of implementing an aware architecture, and the effects of clutter from the availability of too many applications or too much content.