The Unfinished Business of Building the Internet

We've grown so reliant on the Internet that it's easy to forget that, in the big picture, the Internet is still a very new thing.   In fact, it's just barely old enough for us to begin to notice significant anniversaries, such as the 30th anniversary of TCP/IP or the 20th of MIME. 

The Internet's newness suggests that it is radically unfinished.  The technology of printed books hadn't stopped evolving after half a millennium.  The Internet's technology isn't even slowing down yet.  The Internet is unfinished, and will change before our eyes.  What can we hope for, and what should we fear?

We can hope that incomplete realizations of successful visions will move steadily towards completion.  All too often an application is good enough to generate wide use and even riches, yet not completely address the potential need, freezing in place a system that still invites major improvement.  Without ongoing efforst, for example, calendaring and scheduling will never do everything you think it should, and home computers will never get the IPv6 address that could help end their second-class statuts on the network.

We can hope to see true internationalization and accessability, to the point where it will simply not matter whether two correspondents share a common language, or use an assistive technology.

We can hope to see functionality partitioned to give users maximum control over their data with minimum administrative burden.  We need not give up our rights to our data to those who host, administer, or archive it.

We can hope to see the completion and deployment of universal, standardized functionality for broadcasting, multicasting, instant messages, and interoperable real-time communication.  Why shouldn't a Skype user talk with a FaceTime user?  Isolated garden communities are sometimes in the vendor's interest, but never in the user's.

We can hope to see the emergence of open, interoperable systems for new and emerging applications such as identity and reputation management, alternate currencies and payment systems, 
 
We can hope to see the emergence of a societal consensus for strong privacy protection, and the criminalization of privacy violations.  There will always be people willing to infringe on your privacy, and in the absence of norms and laws, they will.

Most of all, we can hope to preserve the Internet as "level ground," on which each of us has the same access to the features and architecture of the net, regardless of cultural and economic barriers.
 
With so much to hope for, the primary fear is that we won't get these things, for any of a number of reasons.

We should fear that vendors with near-monopolistic positions will prevent the emergence of  interoperable communication, preserving today's status quo of mulitple incompatible programs for instant messaging, voice over IP, videoconferencing, and social networking.

We should fear that governments may find it in their interest to prevent or slow the development of potentially useful applications that reduce their control.  This has been the fate of earlier attempts to define alternate currencies, and will probably be played out with BitCoin over the next year or two.

We should fear that powerful commercial interests will use their wealth and influence to kill off potentially-better competitors before they're large enough to be a threat.  This has often been the fate of alternative payment systems on the Internet.

Most of all, however, we should fear that the notion that "the Internet is complete" might become a self-fulfilling prophesy.  If our children don't think there's room left for innovation, they're unlikely to study computer technology, and we're unlikely to ever get the innovations they might have come up with.

The Internet of today is amazing, every day providing me with hundreds of uses that would have seemed science fictional in my youth.  It's a wonderful, almost miraculous technology.  But it could be much, much better, if only we don't decide to settle for what it is today.