The Palace’s Joey Altman envisions an explosion of chefs on-line two or three years from now. They’ll offer real-time cooking shows or a selection of video demonstrations that may be downloaded for a fee. You’ll see the familiar slew of celebrity chefs … “The special hook is the interactivity … it’s going to enhance that feeling of wanting to go to that restaurant. It’s going to be like living out a fantasy, as sick as that sounds.”
Despite all its flaws and faults … there will be a complete dominance of this technology. I have no doubt that this is the technology of our generation and it will subsume much of the world economy.
There’s a great Bill Gibson line: “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” There’s tension from people who are on the (cyberspace) border. I’m afraid it will result in violence before it’s all over. I want to see us thinking openly and seriously about how to avoid bloodshed. Because blood will be shed over this divide before it’s over with. It’s really just a question of how much.
We need to understand that all this stuff about cyberspace is part of an even larger explosion on the planet, which is the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial or Third Wave world. That involves a lot of issues. It involves issues of power. It involves issues of conflict. It involves issues of what’s happening in other countries, involves issues of dislocations and how do we deal with that.
A mass movement for cyberspace is still hard to see. Unlike the masses during the industrial age, this rising Third Wave constituency is highly diverse. Like the economic sectors it serves, it is demassified – composed of individuals who prize their differences. This very heterogeneity contributes to its lack of political awareness. It is far harder to unify than the masses of the past. Yet there are key themes on which this constituency-to-come can agree. To start with, liberation from the Second Wave rules, regulations, taxes and laws laid in place to serve the smokestack barons and bureaucrats of the past. Next, of course, must come the creation of a new civilization, founded in eternal truths of the American Idea. It is time to embrace these challenges, to grasp the future and pull ourselves forward.
The traditional way of looking at TCP/IP and OSI would be that TCP/IP would go away and be replaced by OSI. That is clearly not going to happen. One cannot imagine a scenario of a pure transition from TCP/IP to OSI. But parts of the OSI work can be adopted by the Internet. The Internet architecture has evolved, so it’s not pure TCP/IP but not pure OSI. Trying to get everyone to do everything the same way is utopian. But everyone needs to know what everyone else is doing. This will only work if we’re successful in deploying directories. There are two models today, the current Domain Name System and X.500. There’s a process going on of merging [the two] that will be based on the X.500 standard, but it is not an X.500 system.
One of the most important things I see is putting an end to what I call the protocol wars. The Internet is an inherently multiprotocol environment. The Internet includes X.400 and X.500 directions, and some OSI packet-switching in CLNP. [I suggest we] think of the evolution of the Internet as something independent of the protocol suite [and that] we talk about a multiprotocol Internet rather than just TCP/IP.
[The growing shortage of Internet addresses is] definitely considered the most significant engineering problem on the Internet now. A new group has been given the mandate to come up with a proposal to solve the problem … The most comprehensive solution is to replace the Internet Protocol in the Internet with the Open Systems Interconnection Connectionless Network Protocol. That idea is already almost universally accepted. The process would involve replacing IP with OSI in the National Science Foundation backbone. The regional networks already have installed the ability to switch CLNP traffic. It would not mean a wholesale shift to OSI, but it means the things incorporated in OSI are useful. Ultimately, the operators of the networks would have to agree to do it.
We’re going to have to come up with different policy models. The biggest long-range problem is how the Internet will be managed. Before, it was sort of an insiders’ club and there was no formal structure. The effort now is to try to promote the Internet Society [a nonprofit organization formed this January] as an overall umbrella to include the IAB as well as the IETF and the IRTF, both chartered by the IAB. By incorporating ourselves in the Internet Society, we want to formulate our independence.
I’m sure [Asychronous Transfer Mode] will be a reality somewhere, but it will take longer than people expect. The possibility of it playing a major role diminishes as you move down to the desktop. If you look at data networking infrastructures, they’re nowhere close to capacity. There’s nothing wrong with a high-speed, low-latency backbone, but people want to evolve their infrastructures, not completely replace them. The average user is still trying to figure out how to put internetworking on the floor and keep their Ethernets and token rings running … My rule of thumb is that major paradigm shifts occur when the real market requirement is not understood or has been ignored by the vendors, leaving a pent-up demand that goes unfulfilled.