Last week, the OECD and National Science Foundation had a one-day workshop in Washington examining “Social and Economic Factors Shaping the Future of the Internet.”
One of the papers, designed to help participants determine a set of priorities, spoke of the internet changing from the inside out and from the outside in:
From the inside, Internet technologies are transitioning from an era of deployment and performance to an era of qualitative evolution where a diverse range of environments enables communication in a variety of forms and situations. …
From the outside in, the Internet is now a critical infrastructure underpinning global economic and social activity in a globalising world. Accelerating technological development in relation to the Internet has tremendous technological, political, social, and cultural ramifications that are difficult or in many cases, impossible to comprehend. … the Internet needs to meet social needs placed upon it, expand opportunities for innovation and economic growth, be robust and secure, and scale to evolving requirements.
I only had a little time to flip through some of the background material while preparing for my lectures at U of T this weekend. There was an interesting paper by Mark Handley entitled Why the Internet only just works expressing concerns that the network is on the threshold of collapse.
There were a number of Canadian participants in last week’s meeting. I’d welcome their reports on the workshops. Any private sector viewpoints as well?