Elon University

Subtopic: General

Meeting the Challenges of Business and End-User Communities on the Internet: What They Want, What they Need, What They’re Doing

[New users’] desires and activities can easily distort the usage flows, arbitrarily saturating popular sites and services – most of which, it’s important to remember, are labor-of-love offerings made available for free, but with no guarantee of availability, or intended in some fuzzy fashion for “the Internet community.” But within the past few years, media attention has made the Internet appear a vast, often free super-resource, as opposed to a large, shared resource that users must replenish as well as consume. Moreover, much of the “neat stuff” on the net is somewhere between “proof of concept” and “neat hacks.” There is no way these can be readily available to teeming millions of new cybersurfers within the current provisioning of user services and resources.

The Internet and the Poor

In the information age, access is a more complex proposition that requires support for users as well as information content … There is good evidence that policy directives through the Information Infrastructure Task Force have resulted in broad investments across a range of domestic-assistance programs. Such policy directives should be formalized into Congressional findings in legislative proposals for telecommunications reform. These findings should accent the roles of public libraries and local non-profit organizations in supporting universal service goals.

The Internet and the Poor

It is likely that opportunities in the new economy will increasingly flow to those with access to the National Information Infrastructure – especially those who can strategically apply its resources, as in using electronic mail to enter labor markets. Access to networking could also encourage civic involvement. For example, a recent consumer survey suggested that voting in elections was a highly desired user of networked information services.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

Is the Internet ultimately a common carrier? If it is, what does that imply about access and access control and discipline? We argue that the Internet is truly a common carrier as stated in common law. As a common carrier, the Internet has the responsibility of being an open network with open interfaces. This is readily achieved by the workings of the Internet Society, which sets the standards and establishes the overall architectural evolution for the Internet. The Internet is unique in its ability to deal with users in a fully distributive format.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

Historically, an Internet user was identified as a host. The user has access via the host and the user was merely an extension of this host. This made sense when the user required access to the host for the host’s shared resources. With the increased power, capabilities, and ubiquity of personal computers, migration of identity from the host to the user is more likely. The development of PDAs, which are now user-resident hosts rather than host-resident users, is a technology-driven change that will cause significant architectural change in the Internet.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

The emerging demand for multimedia services and the potential mobility of the new user present several challenges to the Internet architecture that may change its elements in an evolutionary sense … The two major dimensions along the Internet change axes are lowered costs and higher capabilities of communications and processing. The new paradigm against which the new architecture will be measured is multiple hosts per user rather than multiple users per host.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

The network … packetizes data extensively, assuming that it can do so because communications between computers, which are capable of processing the packets. The current assumptions are that data from one location are independent of data from other locations. In a multimedia environment, this will no longer be the case. Data will be virtually aggregated into a compound multimedia object, thus creating a virtual multimedia object whose elements may be from a disparate set of users on the Internet. For instance, my mouse movement at one location will be related to my voice at another and a third party’s video at a third. The concatenation and orchestration of these disparate entities will be viewed as a single totality.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

If the Internet can provide a very-high-speed, almost error-free transmission path, and if the end-user hosts are extremely intelligent, then the ability to do very sophisticated multimedia communications can be effected by the end users directly, allowing rapid migration of capabilities in the network. If the Internet has this enhanced communications capability, then one can develop high-speed protocols that are shared among users, using the Internet as a high-speed computer “backplane” and not just as a datagram network.

Internet Architectural and Policy Implications for Migration from High-End User to the ‘New User’

If low-cost, high-speed access becomes available, then the number of hosts may expand. A host per user, or even many hosts per user, is possible. The concept of a host may then have expanded to include the new and wider variety of electronic entities, including both physical and virtual devices. In addition, wireless access devices, Personal Digital Assistants, and distributed-processing devices must be integrated into the Internet design, since they will allow hosts to be portable and move from location to location. One must be able to “find”: the host, since it will roam around the network.