Dave Clark -Tussle in Cyberspace
Dave Clark is one of the grand old men of the Internet - he was the first chair of the Internet Activities Board (Vint Cerf was the second), he was the Chief Protocol Architect from '81-'89, and his accomplishments are wide ranging.
Terry Gray turned me on to this video of a terrific talk Dave gave at a recent Internet2 meeting (warning - it's a 488 MB QuickTime file) about the future of the Internet.
Dave's thesis is that the future of the Internet will be defined more by legal and social needs than by technical design, as inelegant as technologists and engineers may find that. He characterizes the discussions around social and legal drivers by the "tussle" that occurs between various points of view on any issue.
He's got a 2002 paper on the topic which, while nowhere near as entertaining or broad in scope as the talk, is a lot easier to download:
Engineers attempt to solve problems by designing mechanisms with predictable consequences. Successful engineering yields bridges that predictably don't fall down, planes that predictably don't fall out of the sky, and calculators that give the "right" answer. The essence of engineering is the development and codification of models, techniques and tools that deliver predictable, desirable behavior. The technical development of the Internet has followed this path.
As a community, we focus on design principles that deliver such virtues as robustness, scalability and manageability in the face of complexity, component failures, growth, and other challenges. However, as the Internet becomes mainstream it inevitably moves from being an engineering curiosity to being a mirror of the societies in which it operates. The Internet may have been designed by engineers, but its behavior (and its evolution) is by no means predictable today.
The operation of societies follows a different model. Historically, the essence of successful societies is the dynamic management of evolving and conflicting interests. Such societies are structured around "controlled tussle" - regulated by mechanisms such as laws, judges, societal opinion, shared values, and the like. Today, this is the way the Internet is defined - by a series of ongoing tussles. Different parties adapt its mix of mechanisms to try to achieve their conflicting goals, and others respond by adapting the mechanisms to push back. Thus, conservative governments and corporations put their users behind firewalls, and the users route and tunnel around them. ISPs give their users a single IP address, and users attach a network of computers using address translation. There is no "final outcome" of these interactions, no stable point, and no acquiescence to a static architectural model.
The challenge facing Internet research and engineering is
to recognize and leverage this reality - at minimum to ac-
commodate it; if possible, to use it to strengthen the techni-
cal architecture. In other words, the technical architecture
must accommodate the tussles of society, while continuing
to achieve its traditional goals of scalability, reliability, and
evolvability. This expansion of the Internet's architectural
goals is a difficult, but central technical problem.
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