Danny Amor's Online Library/Danny Amor's Online Library - Volume 1.iso/html/society/pub/speeches/interop-tokyo-keynote.txt

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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


Seven weeks ago on the way to the Internet Soci-
ety's annual international networking conference in
Prague, I visited Geneva to meet with various inter-
national 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 con-
ference room at the ITU.   It attracted people from
virtually every global organization in the city, includ-
ing 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 impor-
tant 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 per-
cent 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 com-
ponent for the Open Society which was the basis for
political and economic stability as well as organiza-
tional 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, gate-
ways, 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 net-
work 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 Econ-
omy."  Much of the new growth is coming from
many thousands of small, fleet-footed new compa-
nies.  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 con-
tinually 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 actu-
ally 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 Informa-
tion Infrastructure that is now diffusing into busi-
nesses, governments, and homes around the world.
Indeed, at Interop Las Vegas in May, Microsoft rep-
resentatives 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 fundamen-
tal transformation that encompasses:

o building information infrastructure from the bot-
  tom-up;

o a robust global mesh for directly linking billions
  of computers and thousands of computer proc-
  esses on whatever telecom and computer plat-
  forms that exist anywhere in the world;

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

o transforming the structure, methods, and indi-
  vidual skills within enterprises, institutions, and
  professions of all kinds;

o a huge, rapidly growing market sector for inter-
  net-related products and services.

1.    Bottom-up Information Infrastructure

The last decade had profoundly transformed the
way we conceptualize and create information infra-
structure.  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 under-
stood, under the aegis of never quite defined nor
accepted concepts like ISDN, OSI, and next genera-
tion mainframes.  Enormous directed monies were to
flow into these projects pursued by national mono-
liths, 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 serv-
ices.  Under combined pressures from rapid techno-
logical 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 univer-
sally implemented.  Massive bottom-up infrastruc-
ture 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 infra-
structure 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 holo-
caust, and a way to bring together experts spread
across the world in "collaboratories" to create, inno-
vate, 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 inno-
vative 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 develop-
ment 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 capa-
bilities.  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 every-
one, everywhere who provides, uses, promotes, or
funds information systems and infrastructure
becomes involved in the growth and use of the Inter-
net, 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 net-
works 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 435,760 allocated
network addresses, 47,846 registered at the global
Network Information Center, and about 35,000
known to have connectivity among themselves.  For
the last several years, the most widely used backbone
network - the NSFNet - has provided a useful refer-
ence point for making consistent measurements.

Total networks increased at the rate of 160 percent
last year; 183 percent outside the USA.  As of 1 June,
IP traffic is being routed to networks in 81 different
nations.  It's known that the European CERN back-
bone usually sees more reachable networks, and with
the emergence of commercial public Internet back-
bones 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 commer-
cial in nature.

Specific focus on both the Asia-Pacific and Euro-
pean regions shows that about a year ago, the num-
ber 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 Inter-
net, 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 mil-
lion.  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 connectiv-
ity 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 commer-
cial service.

Internet traffic is also highly important in under-
standing 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 experi-
enced regular traffic increases of 20 percent per
month.  Outside the USA, many nations have experi-
enced 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 total-
ing 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 ac-
count now for 6.1 percent of the entire NSFNet back-
bone 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 imple-
mentations.  This currently amounts to almost a
terabyte a month of Web traffic.  If this growth pat-
tern 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 net-
works for Email - for which there are numerous
examples like X.400, AT&T mail, MCIMail, Sprint-
Mail, CompuServe, etc.

These peripheral networks create a larger Matrix
Internet that currently reaches 154 countries, and
provide many millions of people with lowest com-
mon denominator Email connectivity.  In this capac-
ity, the Internet is truly the world's universal elec-
tronic 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 capa-
bility that allows almost instant creation of work-
groups, 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 entre-
preneurs.  This activity has taken two forms: 1)
research and development of new distributed net-
work techniques and applications, and 2) innumer-
able 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 popu-
lar 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 distrib-
uted on the network to test and grow the market-
place - 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, stan-
dardized 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 geog-
raphy are being obliterated.  There is also a certain
"compelling" effect that beyond a certain point pro-
motes ever larger numbers of people to become
networked.  Not having an Internet mail address
today has become a major liability in many busi-
nesses and professions.

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

Some major older corporations like IBM and Chrys-
ler 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 opportuni-
ties.

An entirely new and potentially massive new field
is now emerging around the Internet and distributed
networking.  Getting connectivity is only one com-
ponent.  More significant (and perhaps more diffi-
cult) is obtaining and retraining people to effectively
use these tools in many different enterprises.  This
daunting task involves not only equipment, but cul-
tures 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 com-
puters, to discover and make available networked
information resources, and to collaborate seamlessly
across networks with their peers.  These are the sur-
vival skills of rapidly emerging global internet-
worked environment.

5. A Huge Market Sector

The estimated 20-30 million users on the Internet
constitute an ideal market.  The users are predomi-
nantly 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 tra-
ditions for propriety and privacy that rule out mass
mailing or other intrusive techniques.  Such miscon-
duct 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 imple-
mentation of an Internet protocol as a profound
turning point in the evolution of human communica-
tion - 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 encryp-
tion 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 com-
mercial 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 develop-
ments.  Over the past few years, some specific
information on Internet diffusion has become evi-
dent.

Plainly, many external conditions modulate imple-
mentation 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 net-
works all constructed and operated by largely pri-
vate 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 tradi-
tional 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 bilat-
eral 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 carri-
ers.

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 custom-
ers 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 hard-
ware 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 diffu-
sion.  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 chal-
lenged to develop new technologies, standards, and
administrative techniques to provide greater band-
width 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 tech-
nology, new statndards, and administration provid-
ing 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 infra-
structure and cost of service.

Bandwidth seems destined in the long-term to ap-
proach 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 com-
puter 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 inno-
vative 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 discov-
ery, fulfillment and fascination for all peoples - indi-
vidually and collectively.  The Internet Society as
the international organization for the Internet is
dedicated to help make this happen.