IS THE EVOLVING INTERNET ARCHITECTURE IN SYNC WITH WHAT WE NEED?

As the Internet rapidly expands, infrastructure is critical for business, consumer, and social activities. In addition, commercial and government interests are often at odds with the interests of both individuals and enterprises. The question is, what kind of Internet do we want and need?

This Cross-Cutting Concern will examine:

• The future of the Internet: What kinds of changes are likely in the short- and long-term, and how those changes will affect the enterprise?
• Changing application architecture: Web 2.0, the argument over “thick” and “thin” clients, the growth of peer-to-peer applications, the Semantic Web effort, software as a service, and the competitive battle Google vs. Microsoft all promise to change the way we build and use networked applications.
• Internet identity: The Internet lacks any notion of interoperable identity, but it’s clearly a core requirement for everything from buddy lists to secure financial transactions.
• Security: In the face of an exponentially growing number of threats, everyone is concerned about network protection; however, safety, security, and privacy are often cast in a false dichotomy.
• “Smart” vs. “dumb” vs. hybrid networks: Networks that include intelligence at its core, a dumb network in which innovation and intelligence live at the edge, or a combination of the two depending on the level of intelligence or reliability needed.
• Carrier consolidation and business models: The concept of ‘Net Neutrality for service providers shouldn’t put limitations on Internet access. By using technologies such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), some carriers want to exert control over what Internet users can and can’t do over the connections they provide.
• The Next-Generation Network (NGN): The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is migrating to Internet technology, challenging existing regulatory regimes. As globalization picks up speed, Internet governance becomes more complicated. In addition, the number of mobile devices connected to the Internet will very soon outnumber personal computers, further altering the Internet landscape.
• Social computing trends: The rapid growth of social computing, ranging from instant messaging and web conferencing to metadata-rich content sharing and global, massively multiplayer games. BitTorrent and similar services now dominate Internet traffic; what do these and broader social computing trends mean for enterprise business and architecture?
• Enterprise impact: More and more enterprises are finding that substituting Internet connections for Frame Relay, ATM, and MPLS services creates significant cost savings. If carriers succeed in exerting higher degrees of control over the Internet, a lack of ‘Net Neutrality could adversely affect enterprises in multiple dimensions.