There's been much debate on-line regarding the contributions that ever-increasing commercialisation of the Internet will bring. For the most part, the majority would agree that the introduction of big business to the Internet is a natural progression and likely to be a good thing in the long term. After all, it's the money the corporate sector will bring with it that will ensure the continuing development of the Internet infrastructure. This is an important point to make, especially in the light of the fact that on 30 April the US Government stopped directly funding the NSFnet Internet backbone.
The National Science Foundation was one of the original instigators of the Internet, and the NSFnet backbone is one of the most important network routes through which Internet traffic flows. It's the commercial sector, notably the big US telecomms companies, that will step in and take over. Once these corporates are involved, it will be in their best commercial interests to ensure that the infrastructure is developed and improved.
The involvement of companies who want to do business on the Internet has already led to some major improvements for the ordinary user, notably in on-line security and ease of use. For far too long Internet users have been content to put up with badly-written, unintuitive software, almost wallowing in some perverse elitist glow. However, when the big High Street names started to take an interest in the on-line world they quickly realised that the average punter requires easy-to-use software. The result has been the development of World Wide Web browsers such as Netscape, the latest incarnations of which also address the problems of on-line security when it comes to financial transactions.
Netscape Communications has developed an on-line security standard known as the Secure Standards Layer (SSL), which has the backing of such names as Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Visa.
If a company is going to be selling its services or goods over the Internet, both it and its customers need to be happy that credit card details are secure. The use of advanced encryption techniques, such as Phil Zimmerman's PGP (pretty good privacy), help to give this assurance. It's not certain how long this assurance will last, as PGP is currently at the centre of a Federal investigation in the US. It's claimed that PGP could be used by terrorists or others who don't have the best interests of the US in mind, and so PGP is covered by regulations preventing the export of munitions and cryptographic technology from the US and Canada.
What this means is that if you download the PGP program from a US site on the Internet, both you and the site concerned could be liable for prosecution. Zimmerman is also the subject of US investigation and is searched at airports to ensure that he isn't carrying copies of his software when he leaves the country. PGP is yet another example of a technology that could be vital to the burgeoning on-line economies being restricted because of badly informed, technophobic authority.
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