Writing for the BBC’s Tech Lab, Paul Twomey, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) CEO and President, writes about the internet’s potential for change as part of their Tech Lab series. Previous contributors have included Vint Cerf, who at the time was Chair of ICANN.
Writing of the internet’s potential, Twomey says, “at a time of financial crisis, when all are calling for transparency and good governance, the internet economy’s feedback loops should be grasped, transforming the way we think of currency and accuracy of information and to change how we develop policy and make decisions.
“But we also need to stay alert to the forces that may contribute to the fragmentation of the global web.”
Twomey discusses his introduction to the internet and world wide web and that in ten years the number of people using the internet has risen from 100 million people to 1.4 billion today. He then looks to the future, saying “by the end of 2010 5 billion people will have a mobile phone. Many of these will be internet enabled.” Twomey says this growth will be “transformative for the way governments and companies need to consider how information is gathered, analyzed, and acted on.”
Looking slightly further to the future, he says “there will be 1.5 billion new internet users in the next two to three years – just over double the number of current users” and then discusses the introduction of IPv6. Uses of IPv6 include “car and aircraft manufacturers [that] are already preparing for components to be tracked and provide performance reporting through the Net. Such a pervasive public internet will also support private trading networks, using Radio Frequency ID technology, for tracking physical objects through the supply chains of the world.”
Some future problems Twomey raises are that “While the internet unites people, the very nature of its rapid expansion has produced stresses that threaten to fragment it. One force for fragmentation could be political, whether motivated by cultural norms or fear of dissent; it is essential not to confuse the content debates with the underlying global addressing and routing system.
“Another stress could be linguistic fragmentation. Here the role of Internationalized Domain Names is essential to ensure a globally unified Domain Name System, while enabling linguistic localization. There are also technical and business drivers.”
Towards the end of his article, Twomey writes:
“In the coming years, it is going to be vital that we avoid fragmentation and maintain a single interoperable internet. To achieve this, network expansion must continue in order to spread the benefits more widely, and the internet’s tradition of coordination of technical evolution among multiple stakeholders needs to be maintained.
“Corporate or governmental attempts to control will stifle innovation and entrepreneurialism and risk fragmentation.”
The full article is available from:
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8064579.stm