[governance] Video from IGF-USA / Pew report on end-to-end

Tue Aug 24 15:02:01 EDT 2010

FYI,

General reports of the dozen plenary and workshop sessions of IGF-USA 2010
can now be found on the Imagining the Internet site. The coverage includes
55 video clips in addition to the written background. A team of 10 young
people, ages 19 to 26, from Elon University prepared this content:
http://bit.ly/bACRen

In addition, Imagining the Internet and the Pew Internet Project teamed to
produce a survey that a number of IGF participants took part in (thank you!)
 the Future of the Internet IV:
http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/default.xhtml.  It
measured current attitudes about the potential future of the Internet in 10
different topic areas.

The questions in the survey were written to elicit detailed elaborations,
and the qualitative responses  what people wrote  is the valuable
material. One question that mentioned the end-to-end principle was a test of
people¹s beliefs regarding the future of core values. A number of the
respondents¹ elaborations can be found here:

http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/2010survey/future_core_v
alues.xhtml

and here: 
http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/2010survey/future_core_v
alues_anon.xhtml

The responses to the core values question shed some light in regard to the
varied views that are held and they illustrate the need for enhanced
cooperation and capacity building.

Pew Internet director Lee Rainie and I are preparing a book version of the
full, 10-question report. In an overview of the core values question, we
wrote: 

> The majority of survey respondents said it is their sincere hope that
> information will continue to flow relatively ³freely² online, though they
> expect there will continue to be a serious struggle over ³control² of the
> Internet. In this question about the future of the end-to-end principle of the
> Internet and control of information networks, 63% of the experts (and 61% of
> the overall survey group) selected to agree that ³in the years between now and
> 2020 the Internet will remain² as its founders envisioned.
> 
> However, many who chose this statement, which also posited that ³most
> disagreements over the way information flows online will be resolved in favor
> of a minimum number of restrictions² also noted that their response was a
> ³hope² and not necessarily their true expectation. They were recording a vote
> in favor of the core values represented by the end-to-end ideal.
> 
> Among the experts, 29% chose to agree with the statement that ³the Internet
> will mostly become a technology where intermediary institutions that control
> the architecture and significant amounts of content will be successful in
> gaining the right to manage information and the method by which people access
> it.²

I am cutting and pasting a selection of some quotes used in the book here
below. You can find more on the Web at the URLs above, including two
extremely long and deep responses from Laura DeNardis and Doc Searls. Nearly
900 people answered the survey, so what follows is just a small sample,
organized under common themes.

There is too much good history and good experience with the end-to-end
Internet to see a major shift away from this principle. Openness has its
virtues, and those who resist it will fall behind those who enable it. Users
will rise up in protest if there are too many restrictions that get in the
way of the information they want and the content they want to create.

³Net users will band together to keep the Net open. They will continue to
choose open over closed and gated.² Jerry Berman, founder and chair of the
board of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet public policy
organization; president of the Internet Education Foundation

 ³There is too much at stake to allow intermediaries to control the pipe.²
Peng Hwa Ang, dean of the School of Communication, Nanyang Technological
University, Singapore, and active leader in the global Internet governance
processes of WSIS and IGF

 ³The end-end principle will prevail because it allows for widespread
participation in hardware, software, and service innovation as well as
capital formation. Incumbent network operators in some nations will succeed
in asserting increased control over applications, but, in the long run, they
will be at a disadvantage. This will vary from nation to nation, and those
who view the Internet as basic infrastructure and act to balance public
interest and quality of life along with the return on investment of network
operators will be at an advantage in the future. This is related to the
issue of ownership. The question is not whether we will have ubiquitous
high-speed networks in the future, the question is who will own and control
themprivate corporations, government, users?
(http://cis471.blogspot.com/2009/02/lets-slow-down-on-broadband-stimulus-in.
html). Ownership/control will be disbursed among a mix of organizations each
at different network levels. The recent Swedish Regulator's report on open
networks and services makes this point:
http://cis471.blogspot.com/2009/12/swedish-report-calls-for-openness-and.htm
l.² 
<http://cis471.blogspot.com/2009/12/swedish-report-calls-for-openness-and.ht
ml.”>  Larry Press, professor of computer information systems,
California State University Dominguez Hills

³The Internet is not a single-country phenomenon, it is global. The
end-to-end principle is not a single-country concept either. Yet much of
what passes for regulation in this world is regional in nature, fashioned
overtly or covertly by incumbents with monopolist roots and leanings.
Organisations are in a better position to arbitrage between regulations than
ever before in their history. Some, the more far-sighted ones, will be
attracted to environments where access is open and content non-exclusive. As
they scale up and extend their reach, countries will be forced to open up
access and content just to compete. The end-to-end principle, particularly
in the context of no discrimination,¹ will win out over time.² JP
Rangaswami, chief scientist, British Telecommunications

³There are large numbers of people working to protect the end-to-end
principle within the confines of organized structures such as the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and outside of formal venues
(alternate roots).² Elaine Pruis, vice president, client services, Minds +
Machines, liaison, Council of Country Code Administrators

³It seems to me inevitable that nation-states will attempt to exert more
control over the Internet. However, these will be relatively small changes,
so that the Internet will remain relatively free.² Hal Varian, chief
economist of Google and on the faculty at the University of
California-Berkeley

³This will be an ongoing debate, particularly when traditional organizations
see the Internet encroaching on their legitimacy and relevance in the
Internet Age. These groups will flail around to protect their business
models and perceived relevance, but there will be equally powerful
capabilities emerging from the Internet community that will break
through/counter those new controls/restrictions on the flows of
information.² Richard Forno, visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon
University and principal consultant for KRvW Associates; served as the first
chief security officer at Network Solutions (the InterNIC)

³The Internet will defy centralized control as a matter of cultural
imperative and political necessity.² Jeff Jarvis, author of What would
Google Do? and associate professor and director of the interactive
journalism program at the City University of New York¹s Graduate School of
Journalism 

³The end-to-end principle is key for the success of the Internet. If this
principle would be abandoned, the Internet as we know it would seize to
exist, and the usefulness of that network would be less than the network we
have today.² Jonne Soininen, head of Internet Affairs and former system
engineering manager, Nokia Siemens Networks

³I'm totally in favor of the unrestricted Net. I think a lot of people are.
I hope, together, we have the mojo to see that the founders¹ ideals are
preserved. I'm an optimistic person and have answered the questions
optimistically.² Joshua Freeman, director of interactive services, Columbia
University Information Technology

³The history of the Internet is replete with intermediaries who have tried
to control user's access to information, but they have all failed, because
consumers demanded unfettered access. CompuServe and Prodigy tried to limit
access to only Websites that paid them. AOL made it difficult to navigate
away from their favored content to the Web. Consumers demanded more, and
ISPs were forced to provide easy access to all of the Web. There is no
reason to think that consumers won't continue to force providers to give
unfettered access to the Internet.² Andrew Crain, vice president and deputy
general counsel at Qwest Communications

³That horse done left the barn, and did when packet self-routing protocols
were established as the basis of the Internet. No content-based restrictions
can overwhelm the ingenuity of people who want to suborne them.² Charlie
Martin, correspondent and science and technology editor, Pajamas Media,
technical writer, PointSource Communications, correspondent, Edgelings.com

³Although efforts to concentrate and control information are ceaseless,
declining costs and proliferating channels seem likely to enable it to flow
around intermediaries that try to exploit passage unduly, and will provide
channel competition that I optimistically think multinationals and
governments will not be able to block. Looking at efforts to control
information flow by some governments, I'm convinced that they know there are
huge benefits to their publics, and are just trying to slow things down so
they can adjust without disruption.² Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher
in human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work at
Microsoft Research

³There will be fights on these issues, but just as important is how the
Internet as is will be connected to the Internet of things, to health
services, all sorts of measuring instruments and eventually incorporated in
our bodies, (temperature, blood pressure, pacemakers, digitized neurological
systems) bringing us further from always on¹ to always in.¹² Niels Ole
Finnemann, professor and director of the Center for Internet Research,
Aarhus University, Denmark

There are too many powerful forces pushing toward more control of the
Internet for the end-to-end principle to survive. Governments and businesses
have all kinds of reasons to control what happens online.

³The locked-down future is more realistic as things stand now. We've got a
very cautious government, an international movement towards greater control,
and a pliant public. I wish this wasn't the case.² Susan Crawford, founder
of OneWebDay, Internet law professor at the University of Michigan, former
special assistant to President Obama for Science, Technology and Innovation
Policy

³Given events in China and Iran, I am going to take a rare (for me)
pessimistic position. The forces of central control, politically and
economically, are moving to recentralize the power they lost when the
Internet grew explosively. The Net neutrality debate in the USA seems to
temporarily have restrained the cable and telecommunications companies from
exerting centralized control over the architecture, but who knows what will
happen politically with future administrations? Unless a sufficient number
of people resist, I see more and more control and intermediation being
forced upon us.² Howard Rheingold, visiting lecturer, Stanford University,
lecturer, University of California-Berkeley, author of many books about
technology including Tools for Thought and Smart Mobs

³I hope for the egalitarian selection I've made. However, I fear that the
greed of the fewer and fewer, more-and-more-powerful conglomerates, cartels,
multinationals, and monopolies, will allow them to use their power over
government to choke the power of end-users to access and share the powerful
benefits of different-time, different-place, near-instantaneous,¹
egalitarian/equalitarian communications.² Jim Warren, founder and chair of
the first Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference and longtime technology
and society activist

³Much as I want the end-to-end principle to remain, I see it dying. Most
users today, and most vendors of network services, perceive the Net as a
system of applications not as a system that transports packets. The Internet
is headed towards being a lumpy¹ network more like the several mobile phone
networks in the US than the uniform Internet of today. There are a lot of
pressures to drive this lumpiness. We've got the desire of vendors to lock
in customers, we have national competitions and firewalls, we have resource
scarcity (such as IPv4 addresses that are driving the Net to partition via
network address translation, NAT, devices), reaction to excessively heavy
regulatory systems such as ICANN, etc. (PS: I believe that IPv6 may prove a
dud.)² Karl Auerbach, chief technical officer at InterWorking Labs, Inc.

³Whilst the fundamental technical building blocks of the Internet will not
be disturbed, regrettably the technologies that now, and in 2020, will be
used to control information flows, can be incorporated within the Internet's
existing technological architecture. This means that information
intermediaries will have the means to capture more control of content
distribution than they already exercise now.² Jeremy Malcolm, project
coordinator, Consumers International, and co-director of the Internet
Governance Caucus

³This question fills me with dread. It's tautology to say Internet and
end-to-end. The Internet is a symptom of the desire and intention to move
human relationship in the direction of open society. The efforts to control
architecture and information flows are symptoms of intentions to keep
society closed. And, to the degree that they¹ succeed, there is no
Internet. This is a battle we could lose.² Garth Graham, board member of
Telecommunities Canada, promoting local community network initiatives

³As the Internet becomes ubiquitous and increasingly important in commerce
and politics, it will become increasingly important and profitable to
control it. Control will be exerted through control of systems and
architectures, networks, points of access, platforms for sharing, and
content. Dedemocratization¹ processes are currently in the ascendancy in
the US and other nations and these political trends are conducive to
increased control by governments and corporations over all aspects of the
Internet. As in politics, the democratization (and dedemocratization) of the
Internet is not linear. But the trend over the next decade will be
dedemocratization. We already see this in the attempts by China and Iran to
control access and content and in the so-called Homeland Security
legislation in the US to monitor Internet activity. *Cf. Charles Tilly,
Democracy, (Cambridge University Press, 2007) for a discussion of the
non-linear macro-social processes of democratization and dedemocratization.²
Benjamin Mordechai Ben-Baruch, senior market intelligence consultant and
applied sociologist, consultant for General Motors

Smaller networks will be used by human groups that wish to implement
different environments for sharing and consuming content.

³A number of companies have built global IP networks that are not the Public
Internet, but provide similar capabilities to companies that don't want
their traffic to mix with the Internet. These IP networks often offer QOS
services, MPLS VPNs, MPLS pseudowire private circuits, VoIP services,
telepresence services and so on. Soon they will offer secure cloud computing
services as well, competing with Amazon and Google but not on the public
Internet. This activity will secure the Internet's end-to-end principle on
the Public Internet, because anyone who has a technical or business reason
to want something different can get their needs met on the private
Internets. This reduces the pressure on the Internet and the end-to-end
principle remains secure. In fact, IPv6 means that you will see even more
end-to-end capabilities on the Internet of 2020.² Michael Dillon, network
consultant at BT and a career professional in IP networking since 1992,
member of BT¹s IP Number Policy Advisory Forum

³Although it may well be possible to access anything from anywhere online,
in reality the physical requirements such as routers and access points will
always mean that locality plays some role in what is and is not possible. We
will start to see more regionality of control, and greater development of
specific language-based sub-Webs as the predominantly Western-centric Web
becomes less important to the Asian and African continents, and they develop
their own dominant sites along with their own culturally driven methods of
control and administration. However the vast nature of the Web will still
ensure that the majority of Web content remains freely available, following
the end-to-end principle.² Rich Osborne, Web manager and Web innovation
officer, University of Exeter

³End-to-end will continue to be the dominant principle. Any one force that
tries to override it will be overcome with alternative networks that will
eventually restore the end-to-end order.² R. Ray Wang, partner in The
Altimeter Group, blogger on enterprise strategy

³If you move away from the end-to-end principle, you move away from the
Internet itself, and back towards an older mass media model. I cannot see
such a move proceed without significant protests from Internet users
themselves, and without some bright spark finding a way to implement an
alternative, end-to-end Internet that piggybacks onto existing
infrastructure.² Axel  Bruns, associate professor of media  and
communication, Queensland University of Technology, and general editor of
Media and Culture journal

The future will produce a hybrid environment with a bit more control
exercised in the ³middle² of the Internet for some purposes, but for other
purposes it will enable end-to-end practices. Some things will have to be
managed, especially if the capacity of the current Internet becomes
strained.

³We will have an outcome that is a hybrid of your two options. For many
users, the end-to-end principle in its literal form is a painit means they
have to install software and manage upgrades on a PC that is complex and
insecure. It is much better to take advantage of services that are
professionally run. But I think the end-users will be able to maintain the
ability to reach the content of their choice and use the applications of
their choice. The crucial question is not where a function is located (at
the end-point or from a service provider somewhere on the network), but the
extent to which the end-user will preserve the right to choose providers
that they decide to trust. The real question is about trust, not location.²
David D. Clark, senior research scientist, MIT, an Internet pioneer who has
been active in building its architecture since 1981, now working on the
next-generation Internet

³While I chose the end-to-end¹ option, I believe that the reality will be
more of a hybrid where both end-to-end and intermediated connectivity will
coexist. This will be because the Googles and Microsofts of the world will
do their best to shape the channels and will succeed wherever commercial
transactions are involved while a whole range of surrounding end-to-end
services will exist to support a diffuse social fabric.² Mark Gibbs,
contributing editor and columnist for Network World, consultant, author,
speaker and business founder

³While obviously these are contentious issues, in some ways this is a false
dichotomy. Intermediary institutions may well gain more control. However,
there will be minimal restrictions on information availability, because
that's what consumers will demand.² Thomas Lenard, president and senior
fellow, Technology Policy Institute, author of many books, including Net
Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Services Be Regulated?

³We go through cycles of expansion and contraction in our freedoms in
different environments, or spheres of activity. The new and often
unmanageable is tamed and brought under control. Perhaps that is a good
thing, as that state helps to stimulate the next new thing. So, if I wasn't
clear, the Internet will become far more controlled, managed, segmented than
it is today.² Oscar Gandy, author, activist, retired emeritus professor of
communication, University of Pennsylvania

³This is a very hard one. It's complex and multidimensional. Big things like
Net neutrality as well as smaller things like customized brokerage and
management. So it's not a zero-sum game. Both will increase. Fights to
maintain Net neutrality will be fierce, but specialized and proprietary
systems will also flourish.² Ron Rice, chair of social effects of
communication in the Department of Communication and co-director of Center
for Film, Television and New Media, University of California-Santa Barbara

³I really want to check and believe the first option, but it seems that the
rapid increase in use of the Internet is not being matched with development
and expansion of the infrastructuree.g. the predictions that studies
suggest we may run out of Internet capacity in a few years. So, supply may
not keep up with demand and that suggests a bleaker future for an open
end-to-end Internet.² Alan Levine, vice president, community and chief
technology officer, New Media Consortium

³We'll see something in the middle. Understanding that information is static
and that communication is information in action; communication is the key
and access is the lock. Banking/financial institutions and merchant
organizations will develop authenticating/verifying roles of business that
will enhance commerce. Governments will develop roles of engaging in the
communities to govern institutions and protect the constituents. Access will
be open and unrestricted but transactions will be governed by rules of
commerce and community.² Jack Holt, senior strategist for emerging media,
Department of Defense, Defense Media Activity, chief of new media
operations, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs

³The dynamics of the Web continue to evolve. Today steps have been taken to
monetize content, limit views, and control some distribution. Over the past
10 years the practice and arguments over open and closed have continue to
revolve every few years. I believe this revolving door will continue to spin
without clear holistic resolution for years to come.² Kevin Novak, co-chair
of eGov Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium and vice president of
integrated Web strategy at the American Institute of Architects

³Both answers are correct. It will be a long-tail phenomenon, where most
people will go to a few sites such as Google and Apple for most of their
information and applications. We are already seeing this in today¹s traffic
patterns as documented in the recent Arbor study. However, there will remain
millions if not billions of sites that will cater to small communities that
will be accessible as long as we maintain the end-to-end principle.² Bill
St. Arnaud, chief research officer at CANARIE, Inc. and member of the
Internet Society board of trustees

³Some countries will continue to succeed in denying their citizens free
access but it will be impossible to take democracy away from the world at
large.² Adrian Schofield, manager, applied research unit, Johannesburg
Centre for Software Engineering, president, Computer Society South Africa

³By 2020, the Internet will still be dominated by the end-to-end principle.
But general adherence to the principle doesn¹t mean gatekeeping will
disappear. The big development will be much more visibility for the dozen or
so Tier 1 network operators, who collectively provide access to every part
of the Internet on the basis of their settlement-free peering relationships.
Tier 1 network owners like AT&T, Level 3, Sprint, and TeliaSonera operate in
secrecy, and their business practices are not governed by either national
regulators like the FCC or international bodies like ICANN. It is actually
difficult to identify the members of this privileged club, some of whom have
been involved in highly disruptive de-peering incidents in recent years.
They wield extraordinary market power, since Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators are
obliged to procure the bandwidth they need by negotiating for paid transit
with the Tier 1 operatorsnegotiations that are invariably shrouded in
secrecy. This lack of transparency opens the door to anti-competitive
actions to raise prices, increase market share, and punish rivals. A further
issue from a global perspective is that most of the Tier 1 networks are
American-owned, while some of these same carriers, like AT&T, also have a
major stake in Tier 3 ISPs and retail mobile services. The ultimate problem
is that disruptive actions like de-peering affect not just other top-level
networks, but potentially millions of end-users as well. By 2020, look for
the debates about openness to shift from network capacity in the last mile
to the wider problem of data reachability across the global Internet.²
David Ellis, director of communication studies at York University, Toronto,
and author of the first Canadian book on the roots of the Internet

Corporate bottom lines will shape large parts of the online experience and
more pay-to-play business models will affect information flows online.

³'If the entertainment industry gains control of the routers, it will stop
being the Internet, so your dystopian scenario could happen, but not as
written.² Clay Shirky, technology consultant, adjunct professor, graduate
Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University, author of Here
Comes Everybody

³The future is up in the air. There are strong forces pushing us toward the
latter [of the two scenarios presented in the survey]. If we want the
former, we have the power to make it so if the global netizenry makes its
power felt. So far it has not.² Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder, Global
Voices, visiting fellow, Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton
University

³I hope for the former but fear for the latter. This is the biggest
challenge ahead of us and could go either way.² Glenn Edens, technology
strategy consultant, formerly senior vice president and director of Sun
Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist at HP, president AT&T Strategic
Ventures

³The end-to-end principle of Internet architecture ended the day Google was
incorporated. That company's interest in obtaining the world's information
has made it the most dominant information intermediary of any corporation in
history.² Marc Rotenberg, executive director, Electronic Privacy
Information Center, adjunct professor of law, Georgetown University

³Intermediary institutions have the power and incentives to manage access,
and there are no effective barriers to them wielding that power to an
increasing degree.² Larry Masinter, principal scientist at Adobe Systems,
TAG member at the World Wide Web Consortium, formerly Internet architecture
director at AT&T

³I have checked what I desired but I do fear the other alternative will
occur, and the greatest driving factor is what has happened to mobile
phones. The pricing of text, which in theory is a lot easier to handle than
audio, is not a major cost factor and there is no rationale that really
justifies the current price structure and cost to the consumer. Mobile
communications for the phone should only be charged according to the actual
cost of the resources it consumes. The companies are desperately trying to
gain control of the content for phones and cable and getting away with it
because the possible regulators do not understand the future in this area.²
Murray Turoff, professor of computer and information sciences, New Jersey
Institute of Technology and co-author of The Network Nation

³A larger portion of the Web will become fee-based by 2020 and the
information will be managed. Even Web start-ups will be looking for viable
business models, the monetary issues of Facebook and Twitter will not be
repeated.² Brad Adgate, senior vice president and research director at
Horizon Media

³The end-to-end concept is there to stay, but in a trusted way. Not because
(new and old) intermediaries will become barriers to or controllers of the
information flow, no; I think the information bits and pieces themselves
will be trusted. The trust will be embedded into every bit of information,
especially into documents of value (financial, juridical, emotional), and
that will control the flow. I call this transparent money: money (or any
other document of value, like shares or notary seals) that knows its owner,
knows to whom it may be sold or not, and for how long.² Marcel Bullinga,
futurist and founder of Futurecheck, writing the book Welcome to the Future
Cloud

³Control will likely be re-asserted over various forms of popular media
distribution. The controlling companies will exercise it through regulatory
means, threat of sanctions, and through finding business models that work
better for the consumer. They will continue to take a hit on margins until
they strike a balance with what consumers will find it acceptable to pay.²
Sam Punnett, president, FAD Research Inc., analyst, Bell Broadcast and New
Media Fund

³We are already seeing a significant degree of control in large Web 2.0 and
cloud computing applications. Much of the control lies below the surface,
buried in Privacy Policies¹ and Terms of Use,¹ but is real nonetheless. As
these technologies attain too big to fail¹ status this control will not be
given up.² Jim Witte, director and professor, Center for Social Science
Research, George Mason University

³Only now are the issues of content management and rights becoming
widespread and prominent. (In the UK we currently read that all broadband
users will have to share the costs of disconnecting persistent infringers of
IP from the Internet). The first statement rightly identifies a major issue,
but assumes that intermediaries will yield in the face of users and that
minimal controls will be imposed. My view is that rights owners are well
organised and have the sympathy of governments. (This view is reinforced by
events such as the French government's recent decision that Google Books
contravenes French copyright law, and that French law overrides foreign law
on the Internet in respect of services available in France). The answer
probably lies between the two: the Internet will ideally by based on the
end-to-end principle, but there will be a growing realisationbased in a
combination of education and legislationthat there are rights in
information that necessarily place some restrictions on its use and re-use.
The eventual balance will be dictated by a combination of circumstances, and
possibly by alliances of odd bedfellows such as interventionist governments
and the music industries.² Peter Griffiths, independent information
specialist and former head of information at the Home Office within the
Office of the Chief Information Officer, United Kingdom

³There will continue to be centralizing of the content and the resources. It
is the way of business to grow and capture your competition. This the area
where I have the greatest concern, in that it will become too centralized.
Go into many small towns today and you will see a Walmart and many empty
locally owned shops, while not inherently bad for the small town, it is a
sign of the centralization and more power in the marketplace. In some ways
the Internet will continue to grow and be able to accommodate both the large
and the small players, if a few specific areas are guaranteed open access.
But there is a point at which the audience will stop growing and the
centralization will take root. We are just at the cusp another growth spurt,
so that will take longer than 10 years.² Michael Nelson, visiting professor
of Internet studies at Georgetown University, formerly a director of
technology policy with IBM Corporation and the Federal Communications
Commission

³In capitalist societies, surplus value is generated by the insertion of the
capitalist between the producer and consumer. It is therefore difficult to
believe that an institution as fundamental as the Internet could escape the
logic of the capitalist system and somehow remain a purely collaborative
end-to-end system. Various institutions will seek to control the Web for 
their own profitability and will identify various social problems with 
uncontrolled content as a justification for increased control and 
regulation. Consumers will not resist because corporate supplied content 
will be of sufficient quality and quantity to satisfy demand.² Robert 
Runte, associate professor at the University of Lethbridge

³It may be a matter of commercial interest as much as anything, the 
pressures to monetize content. Look at Rupert Murdoch's recent attempts to 
make the content he controls visible only through a specified search engine. 
The pressures will be there.² Pam Heath, principal with Jensen Heath 
(communications consulting firm), trustee for HistoryLink.org, the first 
online history encyclopedia created for the Internet

³A number of very large companies have strategies under way to interpose 
themselves as the intermediary that can direct (and be paid for directing) 
traffic to sites and content they choose.² Heywood Sloane, managing 
director, Bank Insurance & Securities Association Diversified Services 
Group, US

Users¹ desire for convenience and their adoption of easy-to-use Internet 
appliances like the Kindle and iPad, proprietary applications from 
businesses like Apple¹s iTunes store, and specialized content providers¹ 
attractively pre-packaged Web tiers will drive less ³open² activity.

³This is not the happy prediction, and I really hope I'm wrong, but there 
has been so much hype and media and outright pushing of things like 
(proprietary) eBook readers and (proprietary) iPhone applications, and the 
like, that people may come to accept that it is normal for vendors to 
dictate what applications are allowed to run on your machine and what 
content you are allowed to produce or consume. The future of the Internet, 
as some pundits have commented, is very much in jeopardy from these closed 
and proprietary networks, especially those offered by the telecommunications 
companies. This prediction runs directly counter to some of my other 
predictions (nobody said consistency was required). And I really, really 
hope it's wrong, and that alternative networks (powerline networks? mesh 
personal networks? P2P wireless?) offer viable alternatives to closed 
proprietary networks.² Stephen Downes, senior research officer, National 
Research Council of Canada, and specialist in online learning, new media, 
pedagogy and philosophy

³What will change is that people will want to access customized solutions, 
use special-purpose devices like the Kindle, and will have a need for better 
connections for various things like telemedicine. All of this will not be in 
sync with the end-to-end principle but it will use the Internet architecture 
and provide value.² Link Hoewing, assistant vice president for Internet 
and technology issues, Verizon

³The notion of an Internet Service Provider¹ will still exist by 2020, but 
the main distinction will be the service packaging of base and premium 
services, both core and related. Perhaps a more descriptive term might be 
Communications Service Provider¹ (CSP). For example, your CSP could provide 
you with broadband access, and in addition offer VOIP services. In addition, 
the CSP could offer IPTV or so-called over-the-top¹ services such as 
Video-On-Demand, for additional fees, on certain devices. Another service 
the CSP could offer might be mobile broadband. In the process of delivering 
these various communication services, the CSP must invest huge amounts of 
capital in telecommunication infrastructure before any revenue can be 
realized. These CSPs then act in their own corporate interests in order to 
maximize the profitability of the services offered. These CSPs effectively 
become gatekeepers for the last mile¹ of Internet connectivity needed to 
deliver consumer services. This means that pricing and service offerings, 
availability, etc., are all under the control of the CSP. A recent example 
is Comcast purchasing NBC Universal. Now it would be at least theoretically 
possible for NBC content to receive special treatment on Comcast networks.² 
William Luciw, managing director at Viewpoint West Partners and director at 
Sezmi Inc., formerly a director of products and standup philosopher at 
several other Silicon Valley companies

³There will be great pressure by intermediaries to control the architecture, 
and many parts¹ of the Internet might actually end up with these kinds of 
restrictions (such as how people might use the Internet on future iPhones or 
Kindles or Xboxes), but I feel the Internet itself will remain, largely, 
end-to-end, thanks to the advocacy of geeks and lawmakers alike.² Michael 
Zimmer, assistant professor of media, culture and communication, School of 
Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

-- 
Janna Quitney Anderson
Director of Imagining the Internet
www.imaginingtheinternet.org
Senior Fellow, Pew Internet & American Life Project
Associate Professor
School of Communications
Elon University
andersj at elon.edu
(336) 278-5733 (o)

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