The following text is
copyright 2007 by Network World, permission is hearby given for reproduction,
as long as attribution is given and this notice is included.
The fallacy of short term
thinking about the Internet.
By: Scott Bradner
Harvard got a new President the other day -- only the 28th
in its over 370 year history. On
October 12th, amidst much pomp and circumstance, Drew
Gilpin Faust was formally installed in the office she has actually been holding
since July. (See
http://www.president.harvard.edu/news/inauguration/) As is traditional in such
events the new President Faust gave a talk marking the occasion, discussing the
past, present and future of the university and its place in the cosmos. In her wide-ranging and inspirational
talk (http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/faust/071012_installation.html)
she made mention of the current fixation in Washington on quantifying the value
of higher education in the US.
What she said got me thinking about the futility of quantifying the
value of the Internet by measuring its impact on yesterday's business models.
President Faust lamented the
"torrent of demands for greater ÒaccountabilityÓ from colleges and
universities" and the focus on trying to "assess the 'value added' of
years in college." She went
on to say "The essence of a university is that it is uniquely accountable
to the past and to the future – not simply or even primarily to the
present. A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even
about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a
lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that
shapes the future. A university looks both backwards and forwards in ways that
must – that even ought to – conflict with a publicÕs immediate
concerns or demands. Universities make commitments to the timeless, and these
investments have yields we cannot predict and often cannot measure."
The past of the Internet may be
short relative to Harvard but it is important in regards to understanding the
Internet of today. The founding
principle of the Internet technologies and Internet service was that Internet
service was all about moving bits rather than supporting specific
applications. This was articulated
in a 1984 paper entitled "End-To-End Arguments in System Design."
(http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf) This principle underlies the ongoing
debate over "network neutrality," but even one of the authors of the
1984 paper says that its not a simple picture. (http://www.ana.lcs.mit.edu/papers/PDF/Rethinking_2001.pdf)
Today there is a lot of pressure
for the 'Net to do more (or in some cases, less) for particular applications or
service providers - i.e., be redesigned to understand who or what is
communicating and biasing transport based on understanding. Examples of this pressure abound: from
ISPs threatening to degrade service to companies that do not pay them extra to
the recording industry getting Congress to pass laws to require ISPs to become
their enforcement arm. (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.3746:) This pressure mostly comes from people
who trying to hold the Internet accountable to the present, and in particular,
accountable to the people who want to preserve the business models of the past
and present into the future. The
pressure also comes from governments and others that wish to control what
Internet users think and do.
These pressures focus on
today. We have the Internet we
have today because the Internet of yesterday did not focus on the today of
yesterday. Instead, Internet
technology developers and ISPs focused on flexibility thus enabling whatever
future was coming. Making the
Internet primarily accountable to today's interests risks the flexibility that
enables a future we cannot now know and risks "yields we cannot predict
and often cannot measure."
disclaimer: President Faust was
speaking about the role of universities. I applied what she said to the
Internet, about which neither she nor the university has expressed a formal
opinion.