[CAnet - news] The future of the Internet - Red Herring

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[Some excerpts from excellent article in Red Herring -- BSA]


http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=16391

The Future of the Internet

In a decade, the Net will dig deeper into our lives.
If Mr. Cerf and about two dozen other pundits Red Herring interviewed about
the future of the Internet are right, in 10 years' time the barriers between
our bodies and the Internet will blur as will those between the real world
and virtual reality.


While the technical underpinnings of the Internet are likely to undergo
drastic change, the nature of those changes will be wrought by policy
decisions made by governments with a heightened interest in overseeing the
Internet. When a network is this critical to just about everything, it's
reasonable to expect that governments will seek tighter control of what
remains today a decentralized and somewhat anarchic system. The trick will
be to preserve the creativity that spawns innovation-and profit-in this more
vital and inevitably more regulated Internet.

 

No matter what, people will continue to make money from Internet innovation
in a variety of ways.

Services, Services, Services

Mash-ups won't be limited to web sites-we'll see the introduction of
"mashed" real-time web applications. The Internet will further revolutionize
publishing, film, and television. "You will suddenly have a few hundred
thousand producers out to kill each other, competing on the Internet,"
predicts Charles Zhang, founder and CEO of Beijing-based portal Sohu.com.
"You will have instant rankings of the most popular videos," adds Mr. Zhang,
who reckons China will lead the way in this new form.

 
Independent management consultant and author John Hagel III sees
opportunities in network infrastructure management and customer relationship
businesses that put together individualized bundles of products and services
and act as trusted advisors.



A Clean Slate

But this assumes that the current Internet, which was never designed to be a
critical part of an economy's infrastructure, will be able to sustain a
tripling of the number of people connected and the addition of
billions-perhaps even hundreds of billions-of devices.

 

 Concerns about how to prepare for such a future took center stage at a
March 8 meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) in Paris. The meeting drew researchers, telecom executives,
academics, government officials, and economists from the United States,
Europe, and Asia.

 

"The Internet is at a turning point and the changes are big enough in nature
to warrant the high-level attention of policy makers," says conference
organizer Andrew Wyckoff, head of the OECD's information, computers, and
communications policy division.

 

Indeed, willful service disruptions, viruses, and the web's fragility and
lack of robustness have all become issues of enormous importance as the
Internet becomes central to the global economy and people's lives. Even spam
has graduated from irritant to serious threat.

 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Senior Research Scientist Dave Clark,
who has been actively influencing the development of the Internet since the
1970s, believes the Internet needs a total overhaul, not just more patches.


Mr. Wroclawski, working with a team of graduate students as well as some of
the Internet's pioneers, is trying to rethink the Internet from scratch. The
idea is to keep an open mind to what works, including preserving the best of
what we have today. To that end, they are participating in the Global
Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI), a new National Science
Foundation project to build an advanced test-bed network for piloting new
protocols and applications on the Internet.

 

A second NSF initiative, the Future Internet Design (FIND), is one of many
projects aimed at generating new approaches that can be tested over GENI's
advanced test-bed network.

 

"We don't presently have a roadmap of where we are trying to go with the
Internet," says MIT's Mr. Clark. Instead of worrying about backward
compatibility and migration issues, the focus has shifted to "where we would
like to be in 10 to 15 years," he explains. "If the story is compelling
enough, people will figure out how to get there."

 

There are different schools of thought about GENI's ultimate impact on the
Internet's technical underpinnings. Some, like Nick McKeown, a Stanford
University professor involved in three different "clean slate" initiatives,
believe that after testing new technologies over the GENI platform, a
consensus will emerge on one approach and entrepreneurs will innovate around
that-and commercialize their products with the help of venture capitalists.

 


Water or Wine

However, "The biggest challenge to efforts such as GENI will be confronting
the reality that there will be no technical solutions to the top problems of
the Internet that do not also solve the underlying issues of economics,
ownership, and trust," says K.C. Claffy, founder and director of the
Cooperative Association of Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University
of California, San Diego's Supercomputer Center.

 

In short, it will be difficult to choose a technology direction without
becoming embroiled in policy decisions that impact business models.

 

The future direction of the Internet could end up being one in which the
telecom carriers apply their own business model to the Net-one that CAIDA
senior analyst for economics and policy Tom Vest calls "telcotopia"-which
would basically mean a return to the public switched telephone network
(PSTN), where no network service is possible outside of an explicit
partnership with the regional or national PSTN owner. In another scenario,
the Internet could become a government-run utility, whereby network control
ceases to be a strategic business advantage. Finally, the "let a hundred
flowers bloom" approach could be adopted, in which many different
infrastructure control arrangements and business models compete and coexist.

 

The outcome of that debate is likely to determine the technology path of the
Internet. The telcos, for example, are unhappy with just being the pipes
because they can't earn their traditional profit margins. "Society has
decided IP is like water-this has strong implications for a [telecom]
industry structuring itself to sell wine," says CAIDA's Ms. Claffy.

 

So, telcos are pushing to start putting functions in the core of the network
because they believe they can make a lot more money with services than they
can just providing access.

 

Getting Smarter


One idea is to replace today's routers, the boxes that direct Internet
traffic, with much simpler dynamic circuit switches, which would allow the
introduction of new optical technology, says Mr. McKeown, director of a new
Stanford Clean Slate program, which will use outside donations to seed small
projects that could end up changing the Internet's architecture in 10 to 15
years.

 

The upside of this approach could make service providers' networks more
efficient, lower their costs, and make the model more sustainable. The
downside, as USC's Mr. Wroclawski sees it, is that "any move to change the
current overall Internet structure might be tremendously threatening to
innovation in the future."

 


Canadian researchers are already testing a system in which the user owns,
rather than leases, the last mile of connectivity. The user then connects to
a neighborhood co-location point, where he will be free to interconnect with
a phone company-or use an alternative provider such as a Google or a Yahoo.

 

Engineers have already tested the system successfully. Trials with consumers
could start as early as this summer, says Bill St. Arnaud, senior director
of advanced networks at CANARIE, a Canadian industry and government
consortium that is developing next-generation Internet technologies.

Mr. St. Arnaud argues that, just as governments do not define where you can
buy your computer or how much memory it can have, users should be able to
configure their own network, decide how much bandwidth they want, and choose
from a menu of providers.




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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.


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