Shaping the Still-Evolving Internet

In 1980, I started graduate school at Carnegie Mellon.  Purely by accident, I had stumbled into being part of the youngest cohort of geeks who were building the Internet.  

With over 100 computers and over a decade of evolution, the Internet was hardly new, and one could be forgiven for thinking it was more or less complete.  But even as the vision that drove its birth was approaching completion, newbies like me were just beginning to imagine the next Internet that might some day come to be.

It wasn't the astonishing and radical new technology that transformed my life and defined my career.  It was the possibilities.  To a youngster with a vivid imagination, the next 50 years seemed instantly (if vaguely) visible.  So I joined the growing army of people making it happen.

That army was based in research labs, universities, and the military.  We were driven not by profit,  but by a mix of differing visions of what the world of the future should look like -- more an Internet of dreams than of reality.

Today, people like me are an aging, microscopic fragment of the net.  We've seen many of our visions realized, and others left like roadkill on the information superhighway.  We know that there is still much more that the Internet could be, but we grow ever less likely to start another revolution as we age.

In the early days, technology and politics were inseperable, and protocols were shaped by an ideology of openness and freedom.  Today, the technoscenti pursue the political agenda, and can sometimes (as in the SOPA campaign) rouse the masses of user plebes to action, but that's pretty much the limit of their power.  As a community, we have largely ceded the technical initiative to for-profit players, most of them large and ever more cautious.  Power today has passed firmly into the hands of corporations, with occasional intervention from governments.  

In the old days, it would have been scandalous to imagine that something as important as Internet telephony, videoconferencing, or chat would use competing non-interoperable protocols.  Why can't a Skype user call a Google Voice user, or a VoxOx user?  It's outrageous -- but open standards aren't always in the corporate interest, especially for the market leaders.

Today, the most innovative, user-visible areas of work are the ones most likely to attract corporate interest, which means they are most likely to get stalled or stymied in the standards process.  It's illuminating to compare a few old and new technologies:

<b>Email vs. instant messaging:</b>  Email was designed back in Olden Times, without any thought of anyone dominating the market for email, or even  that a commercial  market might exist.  Naturally the idea of "anyone should be able to send to anyone" became a bedrock principle.  After a brief period of resistance in the 1980's by the likes of AOL and CompuServe, it became hard to imagine anything but the globally interconnected email network we know today.

Instant messaging, on the other hand, had strong corporate roots from the birth of the SMS (phone texting) service.  Moreover, the absence of early open standards facilitated the growth of proprietary services such as AOL's AIM well into the commercial era.   The world of text messaging, from its birth, has been a set of separate networks, linked by neither service nor addressing.

Worse still,  instant messaging set the tone for other forms of real-time communication, such as audio conferencing, video conferencing, and more.  There is no technical reason why these can't share universal addressing and interoperation, only political and commercial reasons.

<b>The Web vs Social Networks</b>

The web was born in a world where the Internet had achieved a kind of critical mass within a global community of academics, scientists, and intellectuals.  There were several competing alternatives, but these lost out quickly because everyone saw the value of multiple, independent, interoperable browsers and servers, which drove the web's rapid growth.

The web was possibly the last massively popular Internet application to be based completely on an open standard.   It made the Internet so wildly profitable that few if any subsequent successful applications have been built so openly.  They've been built by people with dollar signs in their eyes.

Social networks, by contrast, are a mess.  The last thing they want is to make it easy for you to share with other social networks.  Instead, they do everything they can to make sure you never leave their own systems.  If you use more than one social network, you have to make the effort of posting and reading in both places, wasting time that could otherwise be productively spent sharing pictures of cats.

Of course, there's no going back, but I think we can still get the Internet we deserve.  The key to making progress, I believe, lies in helping people better understand what is possible, because when they understand the limitations of today's Internet, they will begin to demand something better.   Today the Internet is still new enough for us to be amazed that it exists at all.  Those of us above a certain age will probably always feel that way.  It is left primarily for the younger generation -- those who have grown up with the Internet -- to begin to imagine and demand more.

It is absurd to imagine that today's Internet, less than half a century old, is everything the Internet can or should be.  The improvements, both technical and political, will come largely from the young.  I have no doubt that they can preserve the Internet as a place for economic innovation while solving the problems of closed and incompatible applications.  It may take a little help from governments, but mostly it will take imaginative thinking and energetic implementation -- much of which, incidentally, will also produce the next generation of Internet millionaires.  The most commercially successful Interent companies have usually followed in the wake of the most visionary Internet dreams.

I still have Internet dreams.  I dream of an Internet where my email address is the same as my Skype ID, my Jabber name, my Facebook ID, and my telephone number.  And I believe that if enough people shared my dream, it could still come true.  All that is needed is a vision far-sighted enough to look beyond the limitations of today's commercial services, and the will to pursue it.  There's still plenty of room for innovation left.