The end-to-end arguments have been at the heart of an increasingly political debate about the proper place of communications functions in a physically and administratively distributed network such as the Internet. In particular, what is the right balance between application end points on the one hand, and network intermediaries on the other? This thesis goes beyond the cursory arguments found in much of today's discussions on Internet governance and regulation. It unveils the historical background to the end-to-end principle and develops them with a rigour that has thus far been absent from...