longevity of the internet (was Re: Who invented the internet?)

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Wed Feb 17 13:54:59 1999

Russ Blakeman <rhblake_at_bigfoot.com> wrote:
> The net is not the last I feel either, it's just more popular
> than the others and more commonplace.

I believe that it probably *IS* the last, for a long time (but not
forever).

When Al Gore was still agressively promoting his Information Superhighway
(officially called the NII, National Information Infrastructure), a bunch
of people brought up the subject of whether the Internet would be "allowed"
to operate over the NII. [*]

To me, this seemed like an absurd question. It's like asking, "If there
was a new service to send packages between cities for one tenth the cost
of the current carriers, would people use that to send christmas presents?"

Any publicly available and cost-effective means of transporting IP traffic
*will* be used as part of the Internet.

The Internet *will* be the last public data network because each new form
of telecommunication will be absorbed into it (e.g., ISDN, Frame Relay,
cable modems, ADSL, none of which were around when the Internet was
invented). And new services are added to the Internet all the time.
The World Wide Web is now one of the biggest uses of the Internet, and
it hasn't been around that long.

The only way I can see the Internet getting replaced by something else
is if it finally hits a limit where it won't scale to provide a new service
that is very much in demand. And I can't imagine what kind of service
that would be. But that's the nature of innovation.

Note that I'm not saying that the Internet 25 or 50 years from now will
necessarily much resemble what we have now, except in a general sense.
What I am saying, though, is that there won't be a conscious decision made
at some point to "start over" with something different. Even the
"Internet 2" is simply a high-speed Internet backbone that has tighter
access control. But for all that, it is still part of the Internet,
just as there are many other private backbones with access control (i.e.,
MCI/Worldcom won't carry packets on their backbone for customers of
Joe's Internet Emporium, unless Joe's and MCI/W have a peering arrangement).

I expect that this kind of analysis is what led Microsoft to their
"Embrace and Extent" policy regarding Internet protocols, rather than
their earlier position of pushing proprietary protocols. They figured
out that the Internet isn't going away.

Eric

[*] NIST is developing new standards for the NII; apparently someone in
the government didn't think TCP/IP was adequate [**]. Apparently they have a
severe case of "IH" syndrome, as they did back when they tried to mandate
use of the OSI protocols. Even if NIST does invent new protocols, and
they are deployed in a new NII, almost the first use to which they are put
will be to encapsulate TCP/IP traffic.

[**] Or perhaps, as usual, they simply have too much money to throw around,
and can't figure out a *useful* way to spend it.
Received on Wed Feb 17 1999 - 13:54:59 GMT