Universal Dataflow and Telecommunications

Archive - Historical Material

Issue #26
Fall 1994

60th IFLA Conference: Havana Cuba

The Havana Conference also marked the first time that conference participants were provided with access to the Internet that allowed them to send messages to and from the Conference site. This popular service was provided by the National Library José Marti and the Center for the Automated Exchange of Information (CENIAI) in Cuba. An important component of many of the conference sessions was accessing the information resources available via the Internet to support various types of library and information services.

Workshop: Telecommunications Options for the 90s

Approximately 250 participants attended the workshop entitled "Telecommunications Options for the 90s" co-sponsored by the UDT Core Programme, the Section on Information Technology, the Section on Social Science Libraries, and the Section on Science and Technology Libraries, held Thursday, August 25. Though IFLA Conference workshops are generally limited to 50 participants, a larger facility was made available to accommodate as many participants from Latin America and the Caribbean as possible.

The objective of the workshop was to provide libraries in Latin America and the Caribbean with information on Internet resources and the various telecommunications options to access these resources. The morning session included presentations on Internet basics, Internet protocols and the navigation tools that can be used to access networked information. The afternoon session focused on the communications options including wired, wireless and satellite-based network access available to users in Latin America and the Caribbean. This was followed by a panel discussion on user and technical issues specific to establishing network connections in this region. The workshop materials also included a diskette of files containing information about the Internet and details on accessing publicly available Internet software tools (courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc.).

In general, participants indicated that workshop provided very relevant information and discussions on Internet use. They also suggested that the use of the Internet to support library operations and services should remain a priority for future IFLA Conferences.

IFLA President announces IFLANET

IFLA patron sponsor SilverPlatter Information Inc. (U.S.A) is providing IFLA with the facilities needed to operate an electronic discussion group and document server to be established by the UDT Core Programme in conjunction with staff at SilverPlatter. Initial efforts will focus on establishing the discussion list for use by IFLA membership and making general information on IFLA and some IFLA publications available on a document server. The long-term objective is to establish a well-managed electronic document server for use by the IFLA membership and the international library community that will provide access to IFLA meeting notices, directory information, publications, conference proceedings, and other information via the Internet. The IFLA listserv (IFLA-L) is currently available and readers are encouraged to subscribe and use the list as a forum.

Joining IFLA-L

To subscribe to IFLA-L send the following email message:

TO: LISTSERV@SILVERPLATTER.COM
SUBJECT: Leave this line blank In the text of your message type:

subscribe IFLA-L Your First Name Your Last Name

Send contributions to the list to:

IFLA-L@SILVERPLATTER.COM

Problems or questions regarding the IFLA-L can be sent to:

LISTOWNER@SILVERPLATTER.COM

The goal in establishing this list is to facilitate information exchange as well as professional communication and development within the IFLA community. List participants are encouraged to use the list to:

• disseminate information about IFLA activities
• provide information on activities of interest to the IFLA community
• discuss issues of interest to the international library community.

Initially, this list will not be moderated and suggestions from list participants on how to use this list most effectively are welcome. For further information about IFLA-L and the IFLA document server contact:

Upcoming Conference ILDS 4 - Fourth Interlending and Document Supply International Conference

The conference will feature a three-day program devoted to all aspects of interlending and document supply. Internationally renowned speakers will describe the latest technological advances; publishers will talk about issues from their perspective; and managers will discuss concerns, such as service quality and patron expectations. The conference will also provide an opportunity to find out what colleagues in all regions of North and South America are doing and will feature a trade show of products and services from major document suppliers and system vendors. In all, it provides an opportunity to network and learn from colleagues from around the world.

The UDT Core Programme is assisting in the organization of the Conference in conjunction with the IFLA UAP Core Programme, the Canadian Library Association, and the National Library of Canada.

For additional information contact:

or

Upcoming Conference - 5th Trinational Library Forum

In an effort to continue fortifying relations with information professionals from the U.S.A., Canada and Mexico, the ITESM, State of Mexico Campus is organizing the fifth Trinational Library Forum, February 23 to February 25, 1995 in Mexico City. It is hoped that the forum will provide an opportunity to evaluate common concerns and contribute to the fields of library and information science, as well as to establish professional contacts and different types of exchanges. Subjects to be discusssed include information transfer and document delivery.

For more information about the Forum contact:

Two reports added to UDT Series

Edited by Liv. A. Holm of Norway, this report is an excellent survey and description of the application protocol standards that have been developed for use by the library and information community, and a discussion of technical various issues related to their use. This report was prepared as a project of the IFLA Section on Information Technology and includes contributions from members of ISO TC46/SC4/WG4 and other experts in the field.

Communications, Content Creation, and Dissemination of Information: Selected Internet Projects. 1994 (Report #7). (Available in December 1994)

Descriptive survey of the many different types of projects that have been and are continuing to be implemented throughout the Internet. The projects described fall into the following broad categories - connectivity projects, digitization projects, document delivery projects and library projects, though many have aspects of each category. The report is intended to provide readers with an overview of the many activities related to libraries and information provision taking place on the Internet and perhaps stimulate participation in these types of initiatives.

For information on how to obtain these and other reports in the series, refer to the order form at the end of this newsletter.

Common document formats on the Internet: a brief introduction

1. Unstructured text

Unstructured text documents are the simplest form of document on the Internet. Often denoted by the ".txt" file extension, these documents contain only a simple string of characters and are devoid of more complex information. For example, they do not include information about their structure e.g., explicitly identified titles, paragraphs, authors, page layout e.g., font size, or other, more sophisticated elements, such as diagrams, tables, binary pictures, sound, or links to other documents. The most common encoding standards for unstructured text are ASCII, ISO LATIN 1 and UNICODE.

ASCII

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and was developed more than 20 years ago. The terms "ASCII text" and "DOS text" are interchangeable. ASCII files contain no formatting -- only text, spaces and carriage return codes. When a file is in this format, it can be retrieved into many other programs without additional conversion, since the software-specific codes have been removed. Virtually all PC applications accept ASCII data and can transfer data in the ASCII format. The problem with ASCII transfer is that it strips the file of typographic, graphic, and layout elements. In other words, ASCII is a raw data transfer format. To maintain document formatting, the sender of a file or document and the receiver still must have compatible hardware and applications.

ISO LATIN1

The next level up from ASCII attempts to create larger character sets. ASCII, a seven-bit code, represents only 128 characters, and, thus, is unable to encompass most languages of the world. The number of bits is important for extending the number of special characters that can be presented. Even languages represented in the Latin alphabet use various diacritics not depicted in ASCII, and many languages use different alphabets altogether. The International Standards Organization (ISO) has created an extension to ASCII called ISO Latin1 that handles some diacritics. This standard provides a complete set of characters for the processing and interchange of electronic data in English and French. It represents an eight-bit character set that provides all the alphabetic characters, diacritics, and other symbols commonly used in English and French.

UNICODE

An emerging standard that may replace ASCII is the UNICODE standard. The Unicode Consortium -- including IBM, Novell, Microsoft, DEC, Apple and other industry leaders -- has generated Unicode, a 16-bit code that allows the representation of 65,536 characters. Latin Alphabet #1 is a part of the UNICODE proposal and is being considered for adoption by the International Standards Organization. If adopted, this encoding scheme will be the basis of a single world-wide standard for character representation. Since UNICODE has strong industry support, it is well positioned to become the new standard character-encoding system for all the world's languages. ASCII has, hitherto, represented the only real standard among computers other than IBM mainframes, but ASCII is limited as it represents only English.

Rich text format (RTF)

Moving up from ASCII and UNICODE are those standards which detail how the information is displayed, that is, the actual formatting of the document. One of the simplest and most common of these standards is Rich Text Format (RTF). RTF is an open format which Microsoft developed and is promoting and which allows the creator of a text file to save some minimal kinds of formatting, such as bold, italics and underlined characters. Many programs now allow documents to be translated easily to and from RTF.

2. Proprietary electronic document standards

Another document format available on the Internet are files stored in proprietary document standards, such as those output by commercial software packages. One of the problems with proprietary standards is that there is no market incentive for most companies to ensure the cross-platform or cross-software compatibility of documents. Thus, to be able to read a document in a proprietary format with all of its original formatting intact, the appropriate program must be used. Because Microsoft and WordPerfect are the largest competitors dividing most of the market share in this field, most word-processing will translate between Microsoft Word documents and WordPerfect documents.

To some extent, simple translation across major software packages is now quite routine. Unfortunately, as packages have become more complex and have allowed users a greater range of text-processing options, such as the addition of graphics, tables, equations, and even sound and motion picture files, the problem of translating these formats across applications has increased proportionately.

3. Page description languages

To circumvent some of the problems of proprietary document production, a picture of the pages of the document is "captured" or "encapsulated", using what is known as "page description languages". It is then printed on an appropriate printer or shown on a screen with a display program. In general, a page description language is a programming language used to specify the location and nature of graphical elements on the output page. This program is sent to the printer (or another output device), that contains a computer processor and software enabling it to interpret the program and produce the printed page as described.

Because page description languages enable software applications to transmit an accurate picture of a page between almost any microcomputer and any compatible printer, it has become very useful on the Internet to exchange complex documents. The best-known page description language is PostScript, a proprietary language developed by Adobe Inc., and widely implemented on many different kinds of printers. Adobe has also developed ACROBAT in an attempt to enrichen ASCII code.

POSTSCRIPT

Today, the dominant page description language is Adobe PostScript. PostScript is most widely used for transferring information between applications and platforms, particularly in service bureau and similar environments. The problem with page description languages is that once the file has been transported or imported into another application, it cannot be changed, apart from basic sizing and positioning information, without going back to the original file and originating application, which are not always available. A PostScript file becomes uneditable (except by gurus who manipulate the code within the file itself). Sharing a PostScript file also assumes that the recipient has the ability to print it.

ACROBAT

Adobe Systems has introduced a new computer file format called ACROBAT that will function as a graphically enhanced version of the ASCII file format. Acrobat is an extension of Adobe's PostScript page-description language: a hardware- and applications-independent system that allows computer users to print documents with high-quality graphics and typography. The Adobe Acrobat system allows users to transfer, display and print documents with their typography, graphics, and layout intact, regardless of the receiver's hardware or applications. The catch is that the receiver must have the Acrobat file reader. The Acrobat file format will not immediately replace ASCII as a file exchange standard because, once a document is put into Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF), it cannot be directly edited or converted to its original format or ASCII. One of the benefits of Acrobat over PostScript is that the file sizes are smaller, which means that they can be transferred more quickly over slow networks and are faster to print than Postscript files.

4. Complex documents

More complex documents have begun to emerge on the Internet with the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the graphically-oriented WWW interfaces.

Through a format called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), users of Mosaic and WWW have access to documents that contain still images, video, sound, interactive buttons, forms processing, and a growing list of elements. HTML is subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) -- a device-independent ISO standard for adding "tags" identifying content elements, such as headings, chapters, and paragraphs. HTML has become the de facto standard for specifying how users can mark up text documents for rich- text displaying and creating hypertext links to other objects on the Internet.

A central aspect of HTML documents is embedded links to other objects, such as images, sound files, video clips, gateways to databases, or other HTML documents. These links are in a format known as an URN (Universal Resource Name) and contain three pieces of information: the protocol necessary to obtain the information, the system where the information is located, and the location of the information on that system.

Depending upon whether the document contains graphics or other complex elements, the client and server software "negotiate" over formatting. This negotiation is hidden from the end user. As part of its request, the client software sends a list of formats that it understands. If a server has a choice of formats, or if it can convert one format to another, it will send the formats that the client understands.

Once the HTML document is received by WWW client software, the client reads the formatting commands embedded in the document and displays the document in the way appropriate for the system. For example, a client running under Windows (e.g., Mosaic) could display text marked with HTML as a "Title" with a large-sized, bold typeface, while a client designed for a character-based terminal could display the text in capital letters.

The development of the World Wide Web, and the power of its client software in displaying multimedia documents, is considered one of the most revolutionary developments on the Internet.

This overview provides a brief introduction to common formats and standards on the Internet for representing documents. Librarians should also be aware of many other types of standards and file formats used on the network. These include formats and standards for storing digital images, sound and video, for data compression, and for file archiving. These formats and standards will be discussed in upcoming issues of the UDT Newsletter.

The Present and Future of the Internet: Five Faces

Seven weeks ago, on the way to the Internet Society's annual International Networking Conference in Prague, I visited Geneva to meet various international organization officials and give a seminar on Internet. It was envisioned as a small gathering for a few interested staff at one of my former employers, the Telco World's International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

As it turned out, news of the subject had spread around Geneva and the event became three separate sessions of nearly 300 people each in the largest conference room at the ITU. It attracted people from virtually every global organization in the city, including 30 different foreign missions and six ambassadors who participated actively. The Pakistani ambassador -- who is also the chair of the UN Humanitarian Affairs Committee and provides his Internet address on his business card -- addressed the audience stating that this was one of the most important things now occurring for developing countries. At the same time, the ITU itself announced that it had become the largest Internet access provider in Switzerland and its traffic was increasing at 20 percent per month.

The Society's own INET conference at Prague more than doubled over the past year and attracted 1200 people from 105 different nations. Billionaire Wall Street investor George Soros, in his keynote address to the conference, called the Internet a critical component for the Open Society, which was the basis for political and economic stability and organizational and individual success and self-fulfillment in the 21st century.

A few weeks ago, in reviewing the "metrics" of the Internet at the Society, we found that all measures of the network and its use continued to scale inexorably: ever more connected countries, gateways, networks, hosts, users, services and traffic. A network analyst recently noted that if one of those services -- the World Wide Web -- continues its traffic increase at present rates, it will exceed the world's digitized voice traffic in three years. We are now watching a global internetworking revolution scale in near real-time. Every 30 minutes, another network connects. At the beginning of the month, the Washington Post carried the latest in a series of articles dealing with economic growth and contours of the "New Economy." Much of the new growth is coming from many thousands of small, fleet-footed companies. At the same time, many of the old giants are being dramatically reshaped by young entrepreneurs who are in the vanguard of a productivity revolution that is reshaping the economy. "With the aid of new technology and new forms of corporate organization, they are finding ways to do things faster, better and cheaper, revitalizing entire industries and redefining the terms of economic competition at the same time."

On this Monday, the 30th Meeting of the Society's internet standards body -- the IETF -- began in Toronto. This body conducts its work on the Internet almost continually and physically gathers three times a year -- typically bringing together more than 500 people at the meeting location and multicasting to more than 600 additional sites around the world. More than developing standards, the IETF is a sophisticated technology transfer engine in which creative developers in academic, research, and business environments are joined in a kind of robust creative "soup" wherein they imagine, write code, criticize, test, and very rapidly scale new information tools and services free from stifling formalities and positions.

And now here at Interop -- Tokyo, we witness the event that more than any other has come to represent the rapidly growing one-trillion-Yen, internetworking marketplace and the enormous networked Information Infrastructure that is now diffusing into businesses, governments, and homes around the world. Indeed, at Interop Las Vegas in May, Microsoft representatives said that PC technology has diffused faster than any other form of electronic system, and, at about the same time, they announced that the next version of PC Windows would ship with the Internet Protocol.

Five Faces of Internet

These different experiences over the past few weeks symbolize what I call "five faces of Internet" and comprise the primary focus of my presentation today. Internet is much more than just a new kind of network for transporting data. Rather, it is a broad "redefining paradigm" -- in other words, a fundamental transformation that encompasses:

• the building of information infrastructure from the bottom-up;

• a robust global mesh for directly linking billions of computers and thousands of computer processes on telecom and computer platforms anywhere in the world;

• a means for open collaboration in the hyper development and evolution of new technologies and applications;

• transformation of the structure, methods and individual skills within enterprises, institutions, and professions of all kinds;

• a huge, rapidly growing market sector for internet- related products and services.

1. Bottom-up Information Infrastructure

The last decade has profoundly transformed the way we conceptualize and create information infrastructure. The "old world" was oriented around highly structured monoliths of the telco and early computer worlds that were planned and operated by big government and corporations. The basic plans flowed "top-down" from millions of hours of huge formal meetings and literal mountains of paper which purported to chart the future of information infrastructure for decades to come. They provided a plethora of abstractions that no one quite understood, under the aegis of never-quite-defined nor accepted concepts like ISDN, OSI, and next generation mainframes. Enormous directed monies were to flow into these projects pursued by national monoliths, and trickle-down information infrastructure would eventually settle into place.

There is no intent to denigrate these top-down efforts or the many people who were involved. Indeed, several years of my own career and those of many colleagues were invested in these efforts. However, top-down just did not happen as planned. Instead, a combination of VLSI, PCs, workstations, Local Area Networks, routers, and elegant user-friendly software found an enormous marketplace that motivated individual initiative and investments. At the same time, long-haul transport technology offered increasingly cheap bandwidth, and national governments allowed facilities-based competition among telecoms and deregulated value-added services. Under combined pressures from rapid technological change, competition, and affordable new systems, the world of information infrastructure began a speedy transformation.

At just the right time, robust TCP/IP technologies were available to serve as the universal, intelligent interface among computers. As a result, enterprise networks, distributed network management and applications, and the global Internet became universally implemented. Massive bottom-up infrastructure happened, proliferated, and a new paradigm prevails.

This has been a remarkable decade-long learning experience about what information infrastructure is all about, and in nurturing its development. It's discovery time in cyberspace, and we are constantly learning about what works and what doesn't. This is not to say that all top-down activities are frivolous -- no more than asserting that all bottom up activity will produce meaningful infrastructure. Similarly there is a lot more to information infrastructure than just the Internet.

This "face of the Internet" provides some invaluable models and lessons about key components of national and global information infrastructure and where we are heading in the future. The most prominent of these lessons is that bottom- up infrastructure succeeds most efficiently and spectacularly!

2. The Internet Global Mesh

Constant Evolution: Three Stages

The Internet and internet technology has been growing and evolving since its inception in Vint Cerf's imagination and first articulation more than 20 years ago on the back of an envelope in San Francisco. At the outset, it had multiple facets that addressed real needs: a means to share information-system resources across multiple diverse platforms, a highly robust self-healing network that could operate across almost any medium to survive nuclear holocaust, and a way to bring together experts spread across the world in "collaboratories" to create, innovate, improve and produce in many different research areas.

It is now into the third stage of that evolution. The first stage was the early years under the aegis of the US DOD ARPA and the province of a relatively small, closed community. Those people not only developed the technology, but the cooperative mechanisms and institutions that allowed it to scale the network and further innovation to occur. The genius of it all can still be appreciated at major Internet meetings, which typically bring together a significant cross-section of world's most highly motivated and innovative computer networking communities.

Following DARPA's divestiture of the network and the technologies in the mid-80s, the second stage unfolded. It represented a period of major development by: 1) vendors for a growing enterprise internet market, 2) the USA National Science Foundation, NASA, and Dept of Energy and their counterparts in other countries who scaled the network to support open global academic and research activities, and 3) early innovators in the business sector who began using the capabilities to provide public access services. Interop itself was a key part of this second stage, as it fostered massive investment in private, open-systems infrastructure.

The third stage is now unfolding as almost everyone, everywhere who provides, uses, promotes, or funds information systems and infrastructure becomes involved in the growth and use of the Internet, its technologies, and applications. If the first stage took us to 2000 hosts over the first 10 years, and the second state scaled the connectivity from 2000 to 1 million over eight years, the third state of Internet growth is now marked by host counts that will likely proceed from 1 million to 100 million over the next five years. The growth of the attached networks is now publicly announced every three days, and we are literally watching it grow before our eyes.

Dimensioning Internet

The Internet is generally dimensioned two different ways. The core portion consists of the subset of registered internetworks that are known to have IP connectivity among themselves; the larger Matrix Internet popularized by John Quarterman consists of the core Internet plus all the networks known to be connected to it by some lowest-common- denominator application like messaging.

The Core Internet and its metrics

At the end of May, there were 435 760 allocated network addresses, 47 846 registered at the global Network Information Center, and about 35 000 known to have connectivity among themselves. For the last several years, the most widely used backbone network -- the NSFNet -- has provided a useful reference point for making consistent measurements.

Total networks increased at the rate of 160 percent last year; 183 percent outside the USA. As of July 1, IP traffic is being routed to networks in 83 different nations. It's known that the European CERN backbone usually sees more reachable networks, and with the emergence of commercial public Internet backbones as well as the termination of NSFNet next year, the total number is likely to increase even faster.

Another major trend -- in addition to globalization and the rapid increases -- is revealed in analyzing the kinds of new networks attaching. Most are commercial in nature. Specific focus on both the Asia-Pacific and European regions shows that about a year ago, the number of networks in most countries with significant GNPs began to scale significantly with about 1500 connected networks in each country. The trend seems unabated.

In addition to dimensioning the Internet in terms of networks, it is also possible to do so by reachable computer hosts. Since the earliest days of the Internet, Mark Lottor has been executing an Internet Walk script over several weeks to produce an actual list of every reachable machine. The results are generally released every three months. At the end of December 1993, the number of hosts was 2.217 million. The count increased 69 percent over 1993. Lottor's hosts reachable dimension of the Internet is regarded as particularly significant because the Internet's most basic function is providing connectivity among machines. It is also used in estimating the number of Internet users based on a 10:1 ratio of users per host -- realizing that this is an enormously variable ratio that encompasses everything from the PC on someone's desk to a gateway host supporting millions of users on some other network or commercial service.

Internet traffic is also highly important in understanding usage patterns among countries and among the hundreds of technologies employed as services on the Internet. Traffic on the largest backbones has been doubling every year, and for 1994, seems likely to triple. Many smaller local backbones have experienced regular traffic increases of 20 percent per month. Outside the USA, many nations have experienced initial annual traffic increases measured in the thousands of percent.

At the individual service level, it is worth noting that file transfers account for the largest amount of traffic (around 37 percent currently), with messaging totaling only around 18 percent. The most interesting new services from a metrics standpoint are the browsing variety like World Wide Web and Gopher. WWW, in particular, has grown spectacularly to account for 6.1 percent of the entire NSFNet backbone traffic and grew at the unprecedented rate of 341 000 percent in 1993. New Web servers have been added at the rate of 12 per day over the past three months, and each can support many implementations. This currently amounts to almost a terabyte a month of Web traffic. If this growth pattern persists, some have calculated that, in three years, it will exceed the total world voice communication traffic.

The Matrix Internet

The core Internet's massive size, high performance, and open connectivity has proved a magnet to nearly every other kind of computer network. As a result, many other large and extensive networks have attached themselves to the core Internet's periphery. This includes networks based on specific platforms like BITNET, FidoNet, AppleLink, Minitel, and UUCP networks, as well as specific application networks for Email -- for which there are numerous examples like X.400, AT&T mail, MCIMail, SprintMail, CompuServe, etc. These peripheral networks create a larger Matrix Internet that currently reaches 154 countries, and provide many millions of people with lowest common denominator Email connectivity. In this capacity, the Internet is truly the world's universal electronic messaging backbone.

3. Open Collaboration and Development

Just as the Internet is technologically a virtual matrix among up to 4 billion computers and 64,000 process ports on each of those computers, so it is also a matrix among 20-30 million people who are directly or indirectly using those computers and processes. This is an enormously empowering capability that allows almost instant creation of workgroups, discussion groups, and audiences of all kinds. The capability transcends time zones, national and organizational boundaries, and, in the near future, even language. In its ultimate extrapolation, it is the ultimate open society where anyone, anywhere can provide or receive any information to anyone within seconds.

From its inception, the Internet was intended as more than just a computer network. It is also a means of facilitating collaboration and development at great speed -- sometimes described as technology transfer among disparate groups with different strengths like academics, industry researchers, and business entrepreneurs. This activity has taken two forms: 1) research and development of new, distributed, network techniques and applications, and 2) innumerable user populations employing the Internet and its technologies as tools to enhance their specific professional activity or pursuit.

An entire new engineering and research discipline has been cut out of whole cloth -- distributed, autonomous networking -- complete with its own development dynamics and methods. Mosaic, httpd, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, Collage, Eudora, POP, SMTP, Netfind, Knowbots, NFS, NNTP, VAT, and SNMP are examples of some of the more popular, client-server products to come out of the Internet innovation "soup".

With amazing rapidity, ideas for a new application or service are vetted by a discussion group or at IETF "BOFs" and proceed through a standards working group. At the same time, the code is placed on a network server. In the process, innumerable users employ the code, increase the market, refine the code, and a large commercial market that is finely tailored to end user needs emerges in a matter of months. Even commercial proprietary code is being distributed on the network to test the marketplace -- as is the case currently with 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows operating-system code being distributed concurrently with new versions of Mosaic. This process of developing running, standardized code through the Internet has been highly successful.

It is the more general user populations, however, who are embracing the tools in vast numbers across the planet. The enormity of the implications is just beginning to be understood. For example, it is asserted that 80 percent of all the scientists who ever lived are on the Internet today! And in each of these fields, the people "networked" constitute the majority of early adopters and innovators.

4. Transforming Enterprises, Institutions, and Professions.

The effects of large-scale networking of enterprises, institutions and people are now being realized. Certainly traditional barriers, whether they are reporting hierarchies, institutions, country or geography, are being obliterated. There is also a certain "compelling" effect that, beyond a certain point, promotes ever larger numbers of people to become networked. Not having an Internet mail address today has become a major liability in many businesses and professions.

The result has been to transform old institutions, create new network-based enterprises, and bring about programs to implement these transformations. The best known of the latter is the Clinton Administration's Reinventing Government initiative. However, on a smaller scale, efforts are now underway in Canada, Chile, Argentina, France, and Poland -- as well as many international organizations.

Some major older corporations like IBM and Chrysler have embarked on well-known efforts to get Internet technologies introduced among their employees to break down internal and external barriers. In an increasingly competitive environment, lacking network connectivity and employees, with the skill to use the network tools, is a major liability that is quickly reflected in either diminishing market share or lost opportunities.

An entirely new and potentially massive field is now emerging around the Internet and distributed networking. Connectivity is only one component. More significant (and perhaps more difficult) is obtaining and retraining people to use these tools effectively in many different enterprises. This daunting task involves not only equipment, but cultures and attitudes. And, it also pervades every office in a corporation or institution, from the CEO to the average staff member in every department.

Not suprisingly, there is now a focus on developing these skills at the elementary and secondary school levels so that children, from an early age, are able to use and create information on computers, to discover and make available networked information resources, and to collaborate seamlessly across networks with their peers. These are the survival skills of the rapidly emerging, global, internetworked environment.

5. A Huge Market Sector

The estimated 20-30 million users on the Internet constitute an ideal market. The users are predominantly young, middle to upper class, well-educated, and highly motivated. As the number of Internet users grows another two orders of magnitude, these characteristics are likely to remain, in addition to becoming ever more global.

The Internet provides an exceptionally low cost mechanism for interacting with this audience. This interaction not only includes public relations and advertising, but testing of target audiences, sales, and customer support.

The principal caveat concerns the strong traditions for propriety and privacy that rule out mass mailing or other intrusive techniques. Such misconduct or fraudulent behavior can also propagate very quickly.

The Future

These different facets of Internet will assure an exciting and constantly evolving future.

It seems meaningless to talk about "what's after the Internet" anymore than to talk about what's after the telephone. As long as we have computers speaking to other computers via distributed networks, we will have internets. Indeed, a 100 years from now, history may well record the emergence and implementation of an Internet protocol as a profound turning point in the evolution of human communication -- of much greater significance than the creation of the printing press.

No other form of human communication other than actual meetings allow people to interact with each other in a collaborative fashion in short time-scales. It is this capability of rapid, large-scale, low-cost interaction of people and sharing of information that are unique Internet properties -- which have profound implications across a broad spectrum of human activities.

Important Indicators

It is difficult to predict where all the different facets of the Internet are leading us. In the near-term, we can look at events currently underway to chart likely developments in the coming months.

Business on the net

Certainly, the many initiatives using applied encryption technologies and dove-tailing with pre-existing EDI work, point to all kinds of business-related activity on the Internet. However, this is not likely to displace "free information" given the ever increasing use of the Internet by public institutions, for commercial public relations, or individuals sharing information.

Ubiquity

Other major indicators include both the ubiquity of the access, and the ease of setup and use by ordinary people. Access involves the diversity of the media being employed (such as local dialup, freephone dialup, CATV LANs, N-ISDN, and VSATs) and the ever expanding number of service providers -- especially major carriers and local resellers. Resellers are especially important in this phase of internet evolution because of the frequent significant level of interaction with customers in using the technology. However, some of the newly emerging software for PC environments is so object-oriented and self-configuring that only minimal computer skills are required.

What Modulates Internet Development?

In the face of all these positive indicators, however, it is useful to consider what kinds of conditions result in the growth or stifling of internet developments. Over the past few years, some specific information on Internet diffusion has become evident.

Plainly, many external conditions modulate implementation and use. For example, available capital for investment is always a major factor with any new technology. Even with basic telephone systems, the correlation of telephone lines versus national GNP is almost a straight line. However, the diffusion of internet technologies, networks, and use require conditions that are unique and go well beyond just capital investment to a host of factors that collectively are sometimes called "culture."

A threshold condition is the freedom to introduce and operate Internets without significant governmental or institutional impediments. The Internet consists almost entirely of tens of thousands of private networks, constructed and operated by largely private initiative. The Internet functions very effectively on a global scale through a number of multilateral and bilateral agreements among backbone service providers and end-user networks.

The Internet is a creature of the unregulated, highly dynamic computer networking field -- not the traditional regulated monopoly telecom environment. The Internet does best where the environments are subject to little or no regulation of any kind.

Internet monopoly environments are invariably the worse kind -- being antithetical to the very concept of what the Internet is all about. Such environments are also contrary to the Annex on Telecommunications in the new General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the appended schedules of specific commitments by 96 signatory countries plus the European Union. These provisions elaborate on some of the desirable conditions needed for Internet fertility, namely access to markets and cost-oriented underlying transport circuits.

However, even in competitive environments, some regulatory authorities have a penchant for becoming involved in the operations of Internet providers -- either reviewing business plans or operational agreements. Given the incredibly fast, changing operational dynamics of the Internet scene, such intrusive regulation is inevitably stifling, as backbone providers increase in number and move from bilateral to multilateral arrangements among themselves to lessen the complexities and enhance ubiquitous connectivity.

Other major diffusion factors include the cost of underlying transport bandwidth and the ability to acquire current- technology computers and software at low-cost. These factors go both to the national competitive conditions for basic telecom services and overseeing the pricing practices of dominant carriers.

Dominant carriers in most countries often attempt to charge prices for underlying circuit capacity that are much greater than the actual costs -- principally in a misguided attempt to force customers to use the carrier's own value-added networks and technologies, and to prevent competition. The great circuit price disparities between Europe and the USA, for example, prompted the European Nuclear Research Center (CERN) two years ago to document these practices publicly and plead for a change.

Because end user computers and peripheral hardware are such a fundamental component of Internet growth and development, national practices which heavily tax and restrict computer imports and use, also have a major adverse effect on Internet diffusion. Restrictions or taxes on the use of modems, for example, have widespread negative effects.

The Challenges and Promises

No electronic network mesh has consistently grown on the scale at the speed of the Internet. As a result, it has throughout its history been constantly challenged to develop new technologies, standards, and administrative techniques to provide greater bandwidth and additional services to more users through ever more complex architectures. However, each order of magnitude scaling becomes more difficult.

Problems associated with addressing and security seem largely transitory -- with a combination of technology, new standards, and administration providing effective solutions.

The next few years will likely witness nearly every computer in the world being potentially connected to an internet. This seems well within the realm of feasibility. However, what numbers are actually connected to the Internet or accessible -- through the Internet and at what bandwidths or time periods -- depends largely on the available underlying infrastructure and cost of service.

Bandwidth seems destined in the long-term to approach zero within and among most metropolitan areas of the world, but the increasing complexities of managing ever larger numbers of Internet networks is going to drive operating and maintenance costs up. The result for end users may mirror the computer world where the performance just keeps on increasing at relatively constant cost. In fact, the evolution of computers and computer networks is sure to proceed concurrently. And collective innovative Internet genius will doubtlessly produce an endless stream of imaginative applications and tools.

It is at the human and institutional levels that major unknowns arise -- but also offer the greatest promise. The autonomous, heterogeneous, flat model of the Internet seems intrinsically a good one. It will be constant discovery time in Cyberspace, but a world of shared minds that transcends the accidental boundaries of history, the distance of geography, the machinations of institutions, and the mischief of manipulation, is potentially one filled with discovery, fulfillment and fascination for all peoples -- individually and collectively.

The Internet Society, as the international organization for the Internet, is dedicated to help make this happen.

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