[IP] What the net did next
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:57:39 -0800
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
What the net did next
By Mark Ward
BBC News Online technology correspondent
The internet is set to become the basis for just about every form of
communication, according to net pioneer Vint Cerf, and he should know what
he is talking about.
No matter how long you have been using the net, it is a fair bet that Vint
Cerf has been using it longer.
Not least because Mr Cerf has been involved with the net since its earliest
days, in fact, even before it existed.
He has been called "the father of the internet", although he says that is a
title he is unhappy with.
But if he is not the father he may well be the midwife because he was
present at its birth.
Mr Cerf helped design the net's basic protocols that ensure that all those
packets of data reach their intended destination.
With Bob Kahn, Mr Cerf wrote the blueprint for the formidably named
"Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol" (TCP/IP) that defines the
format of net data packets and how they get to their destination.
TCP/IP was key to turning the Arpanet into the internet.
Small start
The Arpanet came before the net and demanded that all computers that
connect to it do so with the same hardware and software.
By contrast, the net, thanks to TCP/IP, could let people on different sorts
of computers running different software, swap information.
Mr Cerf told BBC News Online that in the early 1970s no-one involved with
the fledgling internet had any idea about what it would grow up into.
"When we were doing the original TCP/IP specifications my sense was we were
just getting all the networks to work together," he said, "It was just an
engineering problem."
Mr Cerf's sense that the internet would grow into something much bigger
took time to form.
He said that his first inklings of its impact came in 1986 when he went to
the Interop trade show in San Francisco and saw the huge stands of firms
such as Cisco, Proteon and Ungermann-Bass who made and sold net hardware.
"At that point it dawned on me that if there was a real commercial market
it was stranded by the fact that the internet was only available to
academic, military and research communities," he said.
This prompted Mr Cerf to move to US phone company MCI to set up the MCImail
service that went live in the early 1990s.
It was helped by a legislative change that allowed commercial traffic to
pass over the government sponsored part of the net.
Add in the World Wide Web and a freely available browser and the rest has
made history.
And, Mr Cerf believes, the net is not done with us yet.
Big changes
He said that the first decade of the net, 1972-1982, was about designing,
testing and deploying the bet's basic technologies.
The second decade was about consolidation and commercialisation and the
third about broad, popular use.
The next decade, he believes, will see the net spread even further and
start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything.
To begin with, he thinks, the net will stop being a part of the telephone
network. Instead the telephone network will become a part of the net.
This could be thanks to Voice Over IP technology that chops up phone calls
into bits of data and sends them across the net instead of dedicated, and
expensive, phone lines.
In Japan NTT's profits have been dented because people can call much more
cheaply via the Yahoo BB VoIP service they get as part of their ADSL
subscription.
Increased use of VoIP could be just the start, believes Mr Cerf.
"You are going to see a fairly dramatic increase in services riding on top
of basic internet infrastructure," he said, "You will see more and more
layers of functionality showing up in the net."
One such could be Grid computing that virtualises processing and storage
resources and lets people use, or rent, the capacity they need for
particular tasks.
Other key areas revolve around novel naming systems that allow objects
other than web servers and net domains to become part of the net.
The Enum initiative attempts to turn phone numbers into net addresses and
give people a universal way of contacting anyone, provided they know at
least one e-mail, address, phone or pager number for them.
Allied to this is the work on Naming Authority Pointer Records (NATPR) that
broadens the net's reach considerably.
"It allows you to take a domain name and map it into whatever ID space you
want to," he said, "I think that's a sleeping giant because it allows you
to escape the bonds of the DNS and move into new naming spaces that have
very different characteristics."
NATPR allows almost anything, such as book or magazine ISDN codes, to
become an address space that the net can work with.
There were also likely to be significant social changes powered by the
spread of the net, said Mr Cerf, even though some of the changes may be
fought by some.
"I think it is hard to stop the proliferation of these technologies," he
said, "I feel like typhoid Mary, I want to spread it as far as possible."
He said: "More information is a good thing."
But he added: "If you have the ivory tower view that the internet is good
only if everything on it is good you are mistaken."
"The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be
reflecting what we see," he said. "If we do not like what we see in that
mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society."
Story from BBC NEWS:
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3292043.stm>
Published: 2004/01/01 03:51:17 GMT
Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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