| Chapter 1: | A Global, Low-Cost Network Thrives |
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“At least 30% of the world’s population will continue to have no or extremely scarce/difficult access due to scarcity of close-by services and lack of know-how to exploit the connectivity available,” he predicted. “Where there is a network, it will indeed be of moderate or low cost and operate smoothly. Security, in contrast, will continue to be a concern at least at ‘Layer-8’ level.”
Jonathan Zittrain, an expert on worldwide access and cofounder and director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, also boiled it down to numbers. “ ‘Anywhere on the globe to anyone’ is a tall order,” he responded. “I think more likely 80% of the bandwidth will be with 20% of the population.”
A Call for All Concerned to Come Together for the Public Good
Raul Trejo-Delarbre of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México urged collaboration among nations. “A significant reduction on the digital divide only will take place in a new international environment, with a genuine multisector cooperation,” he explained. “We don’t have a landscape like that now. In absence of that commitment, we will see an irregular and inequitable development of the wired and wireless resources.”
Author, teacher, and social commentator Douglas Rushkoff summed up the opinions of many respondents regarding the proposed operating environment scenario for 2020 when he wrote, “Real interoperability will be contingent on replacing our bias for competition with one for collaboration. Until then, economics do not permit universal networking capability.”
—Anonymous respondent
Scott Hollenbeck, director of technology for VeriSign and an Internet Engineering Task Force director, wrote, “The technology may exist to improve things greatly, but there will still be economic barriers. Low-cost (even extremely low-cost) communications technology is still something that will have to be balanced against costs for food, shelter, and other basic necessities.”