[e2e] Fie on future internet

[Djamel Sadok]

SMALL Change --> Big leap!
The future internet is nothing but the same as the current one with few
twinks - small changes that may have big (business or technological)
impacts. No one is expected to bank or coordinate worldwide big changes. It
is about being disruptive. Just like the human brain, it still maintains the
basic old parts while adding new (smarter) layers.
There will be no day that one will say, today we have upgraded to the FI.

Someone once said, too much government is bad government. That is the case
of the Internet and a lesson that governments may learn from it. People will
always come up with new ideas and if they work, others may adopt them.
Current FI R&D projects will never be "the" solution.

CENTRALIZATION
What worries me about the Internet is its actual centralization. Take away
few search engines and most users won´t get their work done. Hierarchy as
Jon talked about is good, but I guess he meant it at the structure level.
This hierarchy is missing where it equally matters: the content and service
levels.

May be the notion of federations, contexts, turfs, societies, or whatever
you call them, is the way ahead to break away from such centralized business
model. If like nature, the internet favors the fittest, then we are doomed
with a centralized structure.

CONTROL
Governments, transport systems, banking systems, "telecom systems",
education systems,  and others, like to think they have control and achieve
predictability. We are lucky they did not design the Internet because they
would have used to it to gain more control and kept to themselves as a
secret advantage or tool.

The internet design community saw design ideas as more important than
control and today the internet may be seen as the first real autonomic
system.

BIG PLAYERS
Many big players are today involved. Some are making money and others see
their shares dissipate. The big ones seem to dictate the changes. They
facilitate what they want users to have (make ebook readers, take fiber to
your home to sell you content, ..) it would be interesting to evaluate to
what extent their silent decisions impact the FI. My opinion is they are the
ones who are designing it right now.


The internet borrowed a great deal from areas such as economy, transport,
etc. to build its inner working mechanisms. Those systems have been around
longer than the internet. I would suggest that if those areas are going to
benefit from the Internet
it won´t be at the structural level (routing, buffering etc..), but rather
at the community, cooperation, security, information, levels. The internet
shows that:

1) a simple trust model may work and give its participant many benefits;
2) even when there are no guarantees by the members, the overall system may
still deliver;
3) when each of us contributes with a small resource, the overall system may
outperform any big system;
4) people like free things even if they do not work well;
etc.....

To complement Jon´s thoughts, "higher level" Internet lessons may be best to
use in other areas rather than its underlying mechanisms.

DJamel


On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Jon Crowcroft
<Jon.Crowcroft at cl.cam.ac.uk>wrote:

> I spend a lot of time reviewing
> stuff about the future internet
> then its raining on a sunday afternoon
> so i wrote down what i really think:-
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/out/fie.pdf<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/%7Ejac22/out/fie.pdf>
>
> then i played the guitar to clam down
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsJD5_nX5RE
>
> j.
>

Crucial public systems deliver food, energy, transport,
housing and so on. Three systems seem like low-hanging
fruit when it comes to re-application of the ideas behind
Internet:
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