“Many people have a pragmatic attitude toward technology: they don’t care how it works, they just want to use it. With regard to the Internet, this attitude is dangerous. As this book shows, different ways of structuring the Internet result in very different environments for its development, production, and use. If left to themselves, network providers will continue to change the internal structure of the Internet in ways that are good for them, but not necessarily for the rest of us — individual, organizational or corporate Internet users, application developers and content providers, and even those who do not use the Internet. If we want to protect the Internet’s usefulness, if we want to realize its full economic, social, cultural, and political potential, we need to understand the Internet’s structure and what will happen if that structure is changed.”
Barbara van Schewick, Internet Architecture and Innovation
Today – following housing bubbles, bank collapses, and high unemployment – the Internet remains the most reliable and fantastic mechanism for fostering innovation and creating new wealth. But this engine of innovation is under threat.
The Internet’s remarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. New applications continually enable new ways of using the Internet, and new physical networking technologies increase the range of networks over which the Internet can run. In this pathbreaking book, Barbara van Schewick argues that this explosion of innovation is not an accident, but a consequence of the Internet’s architecture – a consequence of technical choices regarding the Internet’s inner structure made early in its history.
Building on insights from economics, management science, engineering, networking and law, van Schewick shows how alternative network architectures can create very different economic environments for innovation. The Internet’s original architecture was based on four design principles – modularity, layering, and two versions of the celebrated but often misunderstood end-to-end arguments. This design, van Schewick demonstrates, fostered innovation in applications and allowed applications like e-mail, the World Wide Web, E-Bay, Google, Skype, Flickr, Blogger and Facebook to emerge.
Today, the Internet’s architecture is changing in ways that deviate from the Internet’s original design principles. These changes remove the features that fostered innovation in the past. They reduce the amount and quality of application innovation and limit users’ ability to use the Internet as they see fit. They threaten the Internet’s ability to spur economic growth, to improve democratic discourse, and to provide a decentralized environment for social and cultural interaction in which anyone can participate. While public interests suffer, network providers – who control the evolution of the network – benefit from the changes, making it highly unlikely that they will change course without government intervention.
Given this gap between network providers’ private interests and the public’s interests, van Schewick argues, we face an important choice. Leaving the evolution of the network to network providers will significantly reduce the Internet’s value to society. If no one intervenes, network providers’ interests will drive networks further away from the original design principles. With this dynamic, doing nothing will not preserve the status quo, let alone restore the innovative potential of the Internet. If the Internet’s value for society is to be preserved, policymakers will have to intervene and protect the features that were at the core of the Internet’s success. It is on all of us to make this happen.
