Welcome to the Internet

While a lot of false hype surrounds the networked digital world, its nature makes it very easy to measure. As the same measures keep producing quantitative results, the changes over time are available and striking.

What Does the Internet Look Like?

It is a public system that connects hundreds of commercial telecommunication networks, thousands of institutions, hundreds of thousands of businesses, and upwards of a million individual users.

If you want more details, try "Mapping the Internet with Traceroute" from Boardwatch magazine. For traceroute and other mapping tools such as ping all on one page, try Consumer.net.

How Big Is It?

This graph depicts the number of Internet domains registered with InterNIC. It came from Hobbes' Internet World, maintained by Robert Zakon of Mitre. I resized the graph to fit this page and lost a little of the text's clarity. What I want you to notice most is the shape of the curve.

Number of Domains

It's a little like the U.S. Senate, where Rhode Island has the same number of votes as California. Our little medaille.edu that has a couple dozen pages counts as one domain, the same as microsoft.com or ibm.com, which have thousands of pages, or the film studios' sites which have huge quantities of digital video the gobble bandwidth. Note when a printed textbook for this course would have been written: down on the comfortable level before anything really started happening.

How valid is this graph? One way to tell is to compare the shape of the curve to the shapes of the curves produced by similar measures.

This curve is growing exponentially. A roller coaster goes the same way. For a while, nothing seems to be happening. You're going along pretty level. And all of a sudden, it seems, you're going almost straight up.

Where will this curve level off?

That's the billion-dollar question. In fact, it may be the trillion-dollar question. To help answer it, we need some context:

	how have other 20th century technologies been adopted?
	what is the absolute outside growth?
	what factors are driving this growth?

I don't know about you, but when I'm in a roller coaster, the higher I get into the unknown, the tighter I grip onto what's familiar and solid right in front of me. You'll read a lot of anti-hype, from Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil to David Noble's article in the February issue of First Monday. Please direct me to any similar ideas you run across.

Two key concepts:

	scalability: how big can it grow?
	extensibility: what can it attach to?

Who Runs the Internet?

No one does. That's both its strength and its challenge. No country, no company. In one sense, it's an anarchy. More accurately, it's a public collaboration based on human goodwill, which means it's probably teetering on anarchy.

There are, however, some deliberative committees that have established processes to control change -- the antidote to anarchy and the greed it could breed. Note that Hobbes' timeline is stored on boxes maintained by the Internet Society at http://www.isoc.org/. The Internet Society provides a forum for issues concerning the Internet, its protocols, the Internet Architecture Board, and the Internet Engineering Task Force, which maintains the TCP/IP standard.

The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the most authoritative body and is chaired by Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote HTML almost ten years ago. Members, from all over the world, must be organizations or companies. There is no individual membership.

InterNIC controls the assignment of Internet addresses and domain names. Their contract to do so ran out this spring though they will continue to function until a suitable replacement is found.

In a practical way, the infrastructure providers make the decisions what most affect our day-to-day use. These include Internet service providers, your local phone company, possibly your cable TV company, and hundreds of companies that manufacture and put together the networks that make up the Internet.

As economic producer and consumer, as information user, as concerned parent, as a political participant in your own community and the world community, you have a real interest in seeing that the Internet serves you well.

Join the Internet Society and keep abreast of how the Internet is developing: Who's working on what? What major issues are being addressed by whom? Much of this information is reported on Web sites such as InfoWorld. You can subscribe to email lists that will keep you updated. Other ideas:

	Let your local or national legislators know how you feel about the Internet and public issues such as free speech, the right-to-privacy, and public access to information.
	Take part in public discussions about the Internet on Internet forums and in other media.
	Buy products and services from companies you feel are doing a good job of selling and providing information on the Internet.
	Create your own Web page and exchange links with other sites. Become part of the Web's content and structure.

last update: May 26, 1998
http://toLearn.net/marketing/netgrowth.htm