The story of the Net’s first technical crisis – the battle over the Internet Protocol (IP) – offers valuable clues to who controls the Net and where it’s headed. Most importantly, this episode points toward the need for significant changes in how policy issues are decided if the Internet is to maintain its technical preeminence.
Predictor: Steinberg, Steve G.
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 essay for Wired magazine, Steve Steinberg looks at the battle over the Internet Protocol (IP) and questions the way decisions are being made. Steinberg writes: ”The story of the Net’s first technical crisis – the battle over the Internet Protocol (IP) – offers valuable clues to who controls the Net and where it’s headed. Most importantly, this episode points toward the need for significant changes in how policy issues are decided if the Internet is to maintain its technical preeminence. Underneath e-mail, the World Wide Web, and every other Internet application lies IP – the native language of the Internet. Internet Protocol is a set of rules defining how information is sent from one computer to another … By 1991, Internet gurus were confronted with a brewing crisis: the Internet was running out of addresses … If IP was going to be modified, why not also update it for the ’90s? And beneath the question of what the next generation of IP should look like lay an even greater one: Who decides? There is an acronym soup of committees nominally ‘in charge’ of the Internet. But their powers are suspect, their responsibilities unclear. Eventually, after a stab at an IP solution by the Internet Advisory Board (IAB) was met with resistance, the problem was assigned to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) around 1992. The IETF has no official members; anyone who wants to join can. It’s a laudable policy, but it means that decisions can’t be voted on since there is no finite list of members. Instead, the IETF is charged with reaching a ‘rough consensus.’ … The decision was narrowed to three possibilities. The first, PIP (‘P’ Internet Protocol) was so radical it never gained favor … The second proposal was TUBA (TCP/UDP with Big Addresses), which had one big disadvantage: it was associated with the International Standards Organization (ISO). The rigid and bureaucratic ISO has always been the antithesis of the Internet community … The third proposal, SIP (Simple IP), was largely identical to IP but with longer, 128-bit addresses. After a few cosmetic changes, SIP was selected and knighted ‘IPNG’ – IP Next Generation. By the end of the year, IPNG should become the official Internet standard. The transition will be gradual and, if all goes as planned, undetectable to users. But while the 128-bit addresses of IPNG seem ‘future proof,’ the protocol offers few other advantages – it still reeks of ’70s technology. Most importantly, IPNG takes only a small step toward adding the support necessary for high-quality, real-time transmission of video and audio over the Net. The initial battle over IP was between the improvers, who wanted to change IP as little as possible, and the radicals, who were concerned only with the best possible technical solution. Why then did the improvers win? Bob Hinden, an engineer at Sun Microsystems and a key figure in the SIP effort, believes SIP was successful because it offered the ‘most change at the least risk.’ It’s a telling statement … While not necessarily a bad policy (simplicity often means efficiency), it’s in stark contrast to how decisions were made in the past… the IETF combination of rough consensus and open membership doesn’t work in such a huge, diverse online community. Task Force politics are stifling innovation and flexibility – the attributes that made the Internet great. Rather than fighting the entire membership for this ‘rough consensus,’ a small committee with full decision-making power in certain technical areas should be appointed. The committee should be elected from anyone who is interested, but controlled to contain representatives from the user community, service providers, and academia. By electing such a committee, the process would remain open and equitable. And by requiring consensus only within the small committee, radical technical changes would still be possible. These changes would allow the Internet to maintain its technical lead over the creations of mammoth corporations and bureaucratic monsters like the ISO, and still maintain the openness and cultural anarchy that make the Internet unique. If the changes aren’t made, IP’s successor may be spawned by just such a monster and make the Net a far less friendly place.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Protocols
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Addressing the Future of the Net
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/future.if_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney