Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/fade into you/being there/About/Internet History/Present and Future

Text File | 1994-10-12 | 32KB | 617 lines

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  NETWORLD+INTEROP 94 TOKYO 27-29 JULY 1994

  KEYNOTE ADDRESS

            THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET: FIVE FACES



by Anthony-Michael Rutkowski

  EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

  INTERNET SOCIETY




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   Seven weeks ago on the way to the Internet Society's annual
   International Networking Conference in Prague, I visited Geneva to
   meet with various international organization officials and give a
   seminar on Internet. It was envisioned as a small gathering for a few
   interested staff at one of my former employers, the telco world's
   International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

   As it turned out, news of the subject had migrated about Geneva and
   the event became three separate sessions of nearly 300 people each in
   the largest conference room at the ITU. It attracted people from
   virtually every global organization in the city, including 30
   different foreign missions and 6 ambassadors who came and participated
   actively. The Pakistani ambassador - who is also the chair of the UN
   Humanitarian Affairs Committee and provides his Internet address on
   his business card - addressed the audience stating that this was one
   of the most important things now occurring for developing countries.
   At the same time, the ITU itself announced that it had become the
   largest Internet access provider in Switzerland and its traffic was
   increasing at 20 percent per month.

   The Society's own INET conference at Prague more than doubled over the
   past year and attracted 1200 people from 105 different nations.
   Billionaire Wall Street investor George Soros in his keynote address
   to the conference, called the Internet a critical component for the
   Open Society which was the basis for political and economic stability
   as well as organizational and individual success and self- fulfillment
   in the 21st century.

   A few weeks ago, in reviewing the "metrics" of the Internet at the
   Society, we found that all measures of the network and its use
   continued to scale inexorably: ever more connected countries,
   gateways, networks, hosts, users, services and traffic. A network
   analyst recently noted that if one of those services - the World Wide
   Web - continues its traffic increase at present rates, it will exceed
   the world's digitized voice traffic in three years. We are now
   watching a global internetworking revolution scale in near real-time.
   Every thirty minutes, another network connects.

   At the beginning of the month, the Washington Post carried the latest
   in a series of articles dealing with economic growth and contours of
   the "New Economy." Much of the new growth is coming from many
   thousands of small, fleet-footed new companies. At the same time, many
   of the old giants are being dramatically reshaped by young
   entrepreneurs who are in the vanguard of a productivity revolution
   that is reshaping the economy. "With the aid of new technology and new
   forms of corporate organization, they are finding ways to do things
   faster, better and cheaper, revitalizing entire industries and
   redefining the terms of economic competition at the same time."

   On this Monday, the 30th Meeting of the Society's internet standards
   body - the IETF - began in Toronto. This body conducts its work almost
   continually on the Internet and physically gathers three times a year
   - typically bringing together more than 500 people at the meeting
   location and multicasting to more than 600 additional sites around the
   world. More than just developing standards, the IETF actually is a
   sophisticated technology transfer engine in which creative developers
   in academic, research, and business environments are joined in a kind
   of robust creative "soup" in which they imagine, write code,
   criticize, test, and very rapidly scale new information tools and
   services free from stifling formalities and positions.

   And now here at Interop - Tokyo, we witness the event that more than
   any other has come to represent the rapidly growing one trillion Yen
   internetworking marketplace and the enormous networked Information
   Infrastructure that is now diffusing into businesses, governments, and
   homes around the world. Indeed, at Interop Las Vegas in May, Microsoft
   representatives said that PC technology has diffused faster than any
   other form of electronic system, and at about the same time they
   announced that the next version of PC Windows would ship with the
   Internet Protocol.

                            FIVE FACES OF INTERNET



   These different experiences over the past few weeks symbolize what I
   call "five faces of Internet" and comprise the primary focus of my
   presentation today. Internet is much more than just a new kind of
   network for transporting data. Rather it is a broad "redefining
   paradigm" - in other words, a fundamental transformation that
   encompasses:

     * building information infrastructure from the bottom-up;

     * a robust global mesh for directly linking billions of computers
       and thousands of computer processes on whatever telecom and
       computer platforms that exist anywhere in the world;

     * a means for open collaboration in the hyper development and
       evolution of new technologies and applications;

     * transforming the structure, methods, and individual skills within
       enterprises, institutions, and professions of all kinds;

     * a huge, rapidly growing market sector for internet-related
       products and services.

1. Bottom-up Information Infrastructure



   The last decade had profoundly transformed the way we conceptualize
   and create information infrastructure. The "old world" was oriented
   around highly structured monoliths of the telco and early computer
   worlds that were planned and operated by big government and
   corporations. The basic plans flowed "top-down" from millions of hours
   of huge formal meetings and literal mountains of paper which purported
   to chart the future of information infrastructure for decades to come.
   They provided a plethora of abstractions that no one quite understood,
   under the aegis of never quite defined nor accepted concepts like
   ISDN, OSI, and next generation mainframes. Enormous directed monies
   were to flow into these projects pursued by national monoliths, and
   trickle-down information infrastructure would eventually settle into
   place.

   There is no intent to denigrate these top-down efforts or the many
   people who were involved. Indeed, several years of my own career and
   those of many colleagues were invested in these efforts. However,
   top-down just did not happen as planned. Instead, a combination of
   VLSI, PCs, workstations, Local Area Networks, routers, and elegant
   user friendly software found an enormous marketplace that motivated
   individual initiative and investments. At the same time, long haul
   transport technology offered increasingly cheap bandwidth, and
   national governments allowed facilities-based competition among
   telecoms and deregulated value-added services. Under combined
   pressures from rapid technological change, competition, and affordable
   new systems, the world of information infrastructure began a speedy
   transformation.

   At just the right time, robust TCP/IP technologies were available to
   serve as the universal intelligent interface among computers. As a
   result, enterprise networks, distributed network management and
   applications, and the global Internet became universally implemented.
   Massive bottom-up infrastructure happened, proliferated, and a new
   paradigm prevails.

   This has been a remarkable decade-long learning experience about what
   information infrastructure is all about, and in nurturing its
   development. It's discovery time in cyberspace, and we are constantly
   learning about what works and what doesn't. This is not to say that
   all top-down activities are frivolous - no more than asserting that
   all bottom up activity will produce meaningful infrastructure.
   Similarly there is a lot more to information infrastructure than just
   the Internet.

   This "face of the Internet" provides some invaluable models and
   lessons about key components of national and global information
   infrastructure and where we are heading in the future. The most
   prominent of these lessons is that bottom-up infrastructure succeeds
   most efficiently and spectacularly!

2. The Internet Global Mesh

Constant Evolution: Three Stages.



   The Internet and internet technology has been growing and evolving
   constantly since its inception in Vint Cerf's imagination and first
   articulation more than 20 years ago on the back of an envelope in San
   Francisco. At the outset, it had multiple facets that addressed real
   needs: a means to share information system resources across multiple
   diverse platforms, a highly robust self-healing network that could
   operate across almost any medium to survive nuclear holocaust, and a
   way to bring together experts spread across the world in
   "collaboratories" to create, innovate, improve and produce in many
   different research areas.

   It is now into the third stage of that evolution. The first stage was
   the early years under the aegis of the US DOD ARPA and the province of
   a relatively small closed community. Those people not only developed
   the technology, but the cooperative mechanisms and institutions that
   allowed it to scale and for further innovation to occur. The genius of
   it all can still be appreciated at major Internet meetings which
   typically bring together a significant cross-section of world's most
   highly motivated and innovative computer networking communities in
   every country.

   Following DARPA's divestiture of the network and the technologies in
   the mid-80s, the second stage unfolded. It represented a period of
   major development by: 1) vendors for a growing enterprise internet
   market, 2) the USA National Science Foundation, NASA, and Dept of
   Energy and their counterparts in other countries who scaled the
   network to support open global academic and research activities, and
   3) early innovators in the business sector who began providing public
   access services and using the capabilities. Interop itself was a key
   part of this second stage as it fostered massive investment in private
   open systems infrastructure.

   The third stage is now unfolding as almost everyone, everywhere who
   provides, uses, promotes, or funds information systems and
   infrastructure becomes involved in the growth and use of the Internet,
   its technologies, and applications. If the first stage took us to 2000
   hosts over the first ten years, and the second state scaled the
   connectivity from 2000 to 1 million over eight years, the third state
   of Internet growth is now marked by host counts that will likely
   proceed from 1 million to 100 million over the next five years. The
   growth of the attached networks is now publicly announced every three
   days, and we are literally watching it grow before our eyes.

Dimensioning Internet



   The Internet is generally dimensioned two different ways. The core
   portion consists of the subset of registered internetworks that are
   known to have IP connectivity among themselves; while the larger
   Matrix Internet popularized by John Quarterman consists of the core
   Internet plus all the networks known to be connected to it by some
   lowest common denominator application like messaging.

  THE CORE INTERNET AND ITS METRICS.



   As of the end of May, there were 435760 allocated network addresses,
   47846 registered at the global Network Information Center, and about
   35000 known to have connectivity among themselves. For the last
   several years, the most widely used backbone network - the NSFNet -
   has provided a useful reference point for making consistent
   measurements.

   Total networks increased at the rate of 160 percent last year; 183
   percent outside the USA. As of 1 July, IP traffic is being routed to
   networks in 83 different nations. It's known that the European CERN
   backbone usually sees more reachable networks, and with the emergence
   of commercial public Internet backbones as well as the termination of
   NSFNet next year, the total number is likely to increase even faster.

   Another major trend - in addition to globalization and the rapid
   increases - is revealed in analyzing the kinds of new networks
   attaching. Most are commercial in nature.

   Specific focus on both the Asia-Pacific and European regions shows
   that about a year ago, the number of networks in most countries with
   significant GNPs began to scale significantly with about 1500
   connected networks in each country. The trend seems unabated.

   In addition to dimensioning the Internet in terms of networks, it is
   also possible to do so by computer hosts reachable. Since the earliest
   days of the Internet, Mark Lottor has been executing an Internet Walk
   script over several weeks to produce an actual list of every machine
   reachable. The results are generally released every three months. As
   of the end of December 1993, the number of hosts was 2.217 million.
   The count increased 69 percent over 1993. Lottor's hosts reachable
   dimension of the Internet is regarded as particularly significant
   because of the Internet's most basic function is providing
   connectivity among machines. It is also used in estimating the number
   of Internet users based on a 10 to 1 ratio of users per host -
   realizing that this is an enormously variable ratio that encompasses
   everything from the PC on someone's desk to a gateway host supporting
   millions of users on some other network or commercial service.

   Internet traffic is also highly important in understanding usage
   patterns among countries and among the hundreds of technologies
   employed as services on the Internet. Traffic on the largest backbones
   has been doubling every year and for 1994 seems likely to triple. Many
   smaller local backbones have experienced regular traffic increases of
   20 percent per month. Outside the USA, many nations have experienced
   initial annual traffic increases measured in the thousands of percent.

   At the individual service level, it's worth noting that files
   transfers account for largest amount of traffic (around 37 percent
   currently), with messaging totaling only around 18 percent. The most
   interesting new services from a metrics standpoint are the browsing
   variety like World Wide Web and Gopher. WWW in particular has grown
   spectacularly to account now for 6.1 percent of the entire NSFNet
   backbone traffic and growing at the unprecedented rate of 341,000
   percent in 1993. New Web servers have been added at the rate of 12 per
   day over the past three months, and each can support many
   implementations. This currently amounts to almost a terabyte a month
   of Web traffic. If this growth pattern persists, some have calculated
   that in three years it will exceed the total world voice communication
   traffic.

  THE MATRIX INTERNET



   The core Internet's massive size, high performance, and open
   connectivity has proved a magnet to nearly every other kind of
   computer network. As a result, many other large and extensive networks
   have attached themselves to the core Internet's periphery. This
   includes networks based on specific platforms like BITNET, FidoNet,
   AppleLink, Minitel, and UUCP networks, as well as specific application
   networks for Email - for which there are numerous examples like X.400,
   AT&T mail, MCIMail, SprintMail, CompuServe, etc.

   These peripheral networks create a larger Matrix Internet that
   currently reaches 154 countries, and provide many millions of people
   with lowest common denominator Email connectivity. In this capacity,
   the Internet is truly the world's universal electronic messaging
   backbone.

3. Open Collaboration and Development.



   Just as the Internet is technologically a virtual matrix among up to 4
   billion computers and 64,000 process ports on each of those computers,
   so is it also a matrix among 20-30 million people who are directly or
   indirectly using those computers and processes. This is an enormously
   empowering capability that allows almost instant creation of
   workgroups, discussion groups, and audiences of all kinds. The
   capability transcends time zones, national and organizational
   boundaries, and in the near future even language. In its ultimate
   extrapolation, it is the ultimate open society where anyone, anywhere
   can provide or receive any information to anyone within seconds.

   From its inception, the Internet was intended as more than just a
   computer network, but as a means of facilitating collaboration and
   development at great speed - sometimes described as technology
   transfer among disparate groups with different strengths like
   academics, industry researchers, and business entrepreneurs. This
   activity has taken two forms: 1) research and development of new
   distributed network techniques and applications, and 2) innumerable
   user populations employing the Internet and its technologies as tools
   to significantly enhance their specific professional activity or
   pursuit.

   An entire new engineering and research discipline has been cut out of
   whole cloth - distributed autonomous networking - complete with its
   own development dynamics and methods. Mosaic, httpd, Gopher, Archie,
   Veronica, Collage, Eudora, POP, SMTP, Netfind, Knowbots, NFS, NNTP,
   VAT, and SNMP are examples of some of the more popular client-server
   products to come out of the Internet innovation "soup".

   With amazing rapidity, ideas for a new application or service get
   vetted on a discussion group or at IETF "BOFs" and proceed through a
   standards working group. At the same time, the code is placed on a
   network server. In the process, innumerable users employ the code,
   grow the market, refine the code, and a large commercial market
   emerges in a matter of months that is finely tailored to end user
   needs. Even commercial proprietary code is being distributed on the
   network to test and grow the marketplace - as is the case currently
   with 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows operating system code being
   distributed concurrently with new versions of Mosaic. This process of
   developing running, standardized code through the Internet has been
   highly successful.

   It is the more general user populations, however, who are embracing
   the tools in vast numbers across the planet. The enormity of the
   implications are just beginning to be understood. For example, it's
   asserted that 80 percent of all the scientists who ever lived are on
   the Internet today! And in each of these fields, the people
   "networked" constitute the majority of early adopters and innovators.

4. Transforming Enterprises, Institutions, and Professions.



   The effects of large-scale networking of enterprises, institutions,
   and people are now being realized. Certainly traditional barriers
   whether they are reporting hierarchies, institutions, country or
   geography are being obliterated. There is also a certain "compelling"
   effect that beyond a certain point promotes ever larger numbers of
   people to become networked. Not having an Internet mail address today
   has become a major liability in many businesses and professions.

   The result has been to transform old institutions, create new network
   based enterprises, and bring about programmes to implement these
   transformations. The best known of the latter is the Clinton
   Administration's Reinventing Government initiative. However, on a
   smaller scale, efforts are now underway in Canada, Chile, Argentina,
   France, and Poland - as well as many international organizations.

   Some major older corporations like IBM and Chrysler have embarked on
   well-known efforts to get Internet technologies introduced among their
   employees to purposely break down both internal and external barriers.
   In an increasingly competitive environment, lacking network
   connectivity and employees with skill sets to effective use the
   network tools, is a major liability that's quickly reflected in either
   diminishing market share or lost opportunities.

   An entirely new and potentially massive new field is now emerging
   around the Internet and distributed networking. Getting connectivity
   is only one component. More significant (and perhaps more difficult)
   is obtaining and retraining people to effectively use these tools in
   many different enterprises. This daunting task involves not only
   equipment, but cultures and attitudes. And, it also pervades every
   office in a corporation or institution, from the CEO to the average
   staff member in every department.

   Not suprisingly, there is a focus on developing these skills now at
   the elementary and secondary school levels so that children at an
   early age are able to comfortably use and create information on
   computers, to discover and make available networked information
   resources, and to collaborate seamlessly across networks with their
   peers. These are the survival skills of rapidly emerging global
   internetworked environment.

5. A Huge Market Sector.



   The estimated 20-30 million users on the Internet constitute an ideal
   market. The users are predominantly young, middle to upper class,
   well- educated, and highly motivated. As the number of Internet users
   grows another two orders of magnitude, these characteristics are
   likely to remain, in addition to becoming ever more global.

   The Internet provides an exceptionally low cost mechanism for
   interacting with this audience. This interaction not only includes
   public relations and advertising, but testing of target audiences,
   sales, and customer support.

   The principal major caveat concerns the strong traditions for
   propriety and privacy that rule out mass mailing or other intrusive
   techniques. Such misconduct or fraudulent behavior can also propagate
   very quickly.

                                  THE FUTURE



   These different facets of Internet will assure an exciting and
   constantly evolving future.

   It seems meaningless to talk about "what's after the Internet" anymore
   than to talk about what's after the telephone. As long as we have
   computers speaking to other computers via distributed networks, we
   will have internets. Indeed, a hundred years from now, history may
   well record the emergence and implementation of an Internet protocol
   as a profound turning point in the evolution of human communication -
   of much greater significance than the creation of the printing press.

   No other form of human communication other than actual meetings allow
   people to actually interact with each other in a collaborative fashion
   in short time- scales. It is this capability of rapid, large scale,
   low- cost interaction of people and sharing of information that are
   unique Internet properties - which have profound implications across a
   broad spectrum of human activities.

Important Indicators



   It's difficult to predict where all the different facets of the
   Internet are leading us. In the near-term, we can look at events
   currently underway to chart likely developments in the coming months.

  BUSINESS ON THE NET.



   Certainly the many initiatives using applied encryption technologies
   and dove-tailing with pre- existing EDI work, points to all kinds of
   business- related activity on the Internet. However, this is not
   likely to displace "free information" given the ever increasing use of
   the Internet by public institutions, for commercial public relations,
   or just the propensity of human beings to share their own information.

  UBIQUITY.



   Other major indicators include both the ubiquity of the access, as
   well as the ease of setup and use by ordinary people. Access involves
   the diversity of the media being employed (such as local dialup,
   freephone dialup, CATV LANs, N-ISDN, and VSATs), and the
   ever-expanding number of service providers - especially major carriers
   and local resellers. Resellers are especially important in this phase
   of internet evolution because of the frequent significant level of
   interaction with customers in using the technology. However, some of
   the newly emerging software for PC environments is so object oriented
   and self configuring that only minimal computer skills are required.

                     WHAT MODULATES INTERNET DEVELOPMENT?



   In the face of all these positive indicators, however, it is useful to
   consider what kinds of conditions result in the growth or stifling of
   internet developments. Over the past few years, some specific
   information on Internet diffusion has become evident.

   Plainly, many external conditions modulate implementation and use. For
   example, available capital for investment is always a major factor
   with any new technology. Even with basic telephone systems, the
   correlation of telephone lines versus national GNP is almost a
   straight line. However, the diffusion of internet technologies,
   networks, and use require conditions that are really rather unique and
   go well beyond just capital investment to a host of factors that
   collectively are sometimes called "culture."

   A threshold condition is the freedom introduce and operate Internets
   without significant governmental or institutional impediments. The
   Internet consists almost entirely of tens of thousands of private
   networks all constructed and operated by largely private initiative.
   The Internet functions very effectively on a global scale through a
   number of multilateral and bilateral agreements among backbone service
   providers and end-user networks.

   The Internet is a creature of the unregulated, highly dynamic computer
   networking field - not the traditional regulated monopoly telecom
   environment. The Internet does best where the environments are subject
   to little or no regulation of any kind.

   Internet monopoly environments are invariably the worse kind - being
   antithetical to the very concept of what the Internet is all about.
   Such environments are also contrary to the Annex on Telecommunications
   in the new General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the
   appended schedules of specific commitments by 96 signatory countries
   plus the European Union. These provisions elaborate on some of the
   desirable conditions needed for Internet fertility, namely access to
   markets and cost-oriented underlying transport circuits.

   However, even in competitive environments, some regulatory authorities
   have a penchant for becoming involved in the operations of Internet
   providers - either reviewing business plans or operational agreements.
   Given the incredibly fast changing operational dynamics of the
   Internet scene, such intrusive regulation is inevitably stifling, as
   backbone providers increase in number and move from bilateral to
   multilateral arrangements among themselves to lessen the complexities
   and enhance ubiquitous connectivity.

   Other major diffusion factors include the cost of underlying transport
   bandwidth and the ability to acquire current-technology computers and
   software at low-cost. These factors go both to the national
   competitive conditions for basic telecom services and oversight of the
   pricing practices of dominant carriers.

   Dominant carriers in most countries often attempt to charge prices for
   underlying circuit capacity that are orders of magnitude greater than
   the actual costs - principally in a misguided attempt to force
   customers to use the carrier's own value added networks and
   technologies, and to prevent competition. The great circuit price
   disparities between Europe and the USA, for example, prompted the
   European Nuclear Research Center (CERN) two years ago to publicly
   document these practices and plead for a change.

   Because end user computers and peripheral hardware are such a
   fundamental component of Internet growth and development, national
   practices which heavily tax and restrict computer imports and use,
   also have a major adverse effect on Internet diffusion. Restrictions
   or taxes on the use of modems, for example, have widespread negative
   effects.

                          THE CHALLENGES AND PROMISES



   No electronic network mesh has consistently grown on the scale at the
   speed of the Internet. As a result, it has throughout its history been
   constantly challenged to develop new technologies, standards, and
   administrative techniques to provide greater bandwidth and additional
   services to more users through ever more complex architectures.
   However, each order of magnitude scaling becomes more difficult.

   Problems associated with addressing and security seem largely
   transitory - with a combination of technology, new statndards, and
   administration providing effective solutions.

   The next few years will likely witness nearly every computer in the
   world being potentially connected to an internet. This seems well
   within the realm of feasibility. However, what numbers are actually
   connected to the Internet or accessible - through the Internet and at
   what bandwidths or time periods - depends largely on the available
   underlying infrastructure and cost of service.

   Bandwidth seems destined in the long-term to approach zero within and
   among most metropolitan areas of the world, but the increasing
   complexities of managing ever larger numbers of Internet networks is
   going to drive operation and maintenance costs up. The result for end
   users may mirror the computer world where the performance just keeps
   on increasing at relatively constant cost. In fact, the evolution of
   computers and computer networks is sure to proceed hand in hand. And
   collective innovative Internet genius will doubtlessly produce an
   endless stream of imaginative applications and tools.

   It is at the human and institutional levels that major unknowns arise
   - but also offer the greatest promise. The autonomous, heterogeneous,
   flat model of the Internet seems intrinsically a good one. It will be
   constant discovery time in Cyberspace, but a world of shared minds
   that transcends the accidental boundaries of history, the distance of
   geography, the machinations of institutions, and the mischief of
   manipulation, is potentially one filled with discovery, fulfillment
   and fascination for all peoples - individually and collectively.

   The Internet Society as the international organization for the
   Internet is dedicated to help make this happen.


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