| Chapter 1: | A Global, Low-Cost Network Thrives |
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So, yes,” he wrote, “I suspect there will be a global, low-cost network in 2020. That’s not to say that interoperability will be perfect, however. There are various interests that have a vested interest in limiting interoperability in various ways, and they will in 2020 still be hard at work.”
One of the key actors in the development of another “variety of network” is David Clark of MIT. Clark is working under a National Science Foundation grant for the Global Environment for Networking Investigations (GENI) to build new naming, addressing, and identity architectures and further develop an improved Internet. In his survey response, Clark expressed hope for the future. “A low-cost network will exist,” he wrote. “The question is how interconnected and open it will be. The question is whether we drift toward a ‘reintegration’ of content and infrastructure.”
Robert Shaw, Internet strategy and policy advisor for the International Telecommunication Union and official advisor to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, wrote, “Cross-border tensions on audio-visual policies will continue to rise in importance, and, with the ineffectiveness of national regulator regimes to deal with them, there will be a bigger push for both ‘national walled gardens’ and international cooperation.”
—Stine Gotved, cultural sociologist, University of Copenhagen
Bruce Edmonds of the Centre for Policy Modeling at Manchester, U.K., expects that continuous changes wrought by the evolution of Internet architecture will remove any chance for a “perfected” or “smooth” future. “New technologies requiring new standards,” he pre-dicted, “will ensure that (1) interop-erability remains a problem, and (2) bandwidth will always be used up, preventing smooth data flow. Billing will remain a problem in some parts of the world because such monetary integration is inextricably political.”