Comment by somat

One reason I heard the internet works as well as it does is that it inverts the bell system. Where the bell system is a smart network with dumb edge devices. The internet is a dumb network with smart edge devices. The reason this is supposed to be better is that it is much much easier to upgrade the network.

And this sort of checks out, most of the complaints about the internet architecture is when someone starts putting put smart middle boxes in a load bearing capacity and now it becomes hard to deploy new edge devices.