How the Internet Came to Be - Page 10

In 1990 a conscious effort was made to link in commercial and nonprofit information service providers, and this has also turned out to be useful. Among others, Dow Jones, Telebase, Dialog, CARL, the National Library of Medicine, and RLIN are now online.

The last few years have seen internationalization of the system and commercialization, new constituencies well outside of computer science and electrical engineering, regulatory concerns, and security concerns from businesses and out of a concern for our dependence on this as infrastructure. There are questions of pricing and privacy; all of these things are having a significant impact on the technology evolution plan, and with many different stakeholders there are many divergent views of the right way to deal with various problems. These views have to be heard and compromises worked out.

The recent rash of books about the Internet is indicative of the emerging recognition of this system as a very critical international infrastructure, and not just for the research and education community.

I was astonished to see the CCITT bring up an Internet node; the U.N. has just brought up a node, un.org; IEEE and ACM are bringing their systems up. We are well beyond critical mass now. The 1990s will continue this exponential growth phase. The other scary thing is that we are beginning to see experimentation with packet voice and packet video. I fully anticipate that an Internet TV guide will show up in the next couple of years.

I think this kind of phenomenon is going to exacerbate the need for understanding the economics of these systems and how to deal with charging for use of resources. I hesitate to speculate; currently where charges are made they are a fixed price based on the size of the access pipe. It is possible that the continuous transmission requirements of sound and video will require different charging because you are not getting statistical sharing during continuous broadcasting. In the case of multicasting, one packet is multiplied many times. Things like this weren't contemplated when the flat-rate charging algorithms were developed, so the service providers may have to reexamine their charging policies.

Concurrent with the exponential explosion in Internet use has come the recognition that there is a real community out there. The community now needs to recognize that it exists, that it has a diversity of interests, and that it has responsibilities to those who are dependent on the continued health of the network. The Internet Society was founded in January 1992. With assistance from the Federal Networking Council, the Internet Society supports the IETF and IAB and educates the broad community by holding conferences and workshops, by proselytizing, and by making information available.

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