Presenter: Roger Clarke
Abstract: ‘Directions in Internet Technology’ v.1
This session reviews recent developments and current promises in Internet technologies, and examines their impacts and second-order implications. The clusters of ideas addressed are: Internet-Connected Devices ; Applications for Collaboration and Subversion ; Internet Governance by whom, and for whom? ; Counter-Attacks by the Powerful ; From Data to Meaning? to Knowledge?? ?
Internet-Connected Devices
The first cluster of technological development is concerned with the proliferation of devices that are connected to the Internet. The Internet was conceived for moderate numbers of stationary devices. It is being applied (with some difficulty) to mobile, handheld devices. It is also being touted for 'appliances' in the sense of 'white goods' (with refrigerators making a promotional splash), and for RFID chips (smart cards re-born small), and the idea will be in due course be transferred to so-called 'smart dust'. The augmentation of the longstanding IPv4 protocol with IPv6, and perhaps its gradual replacement, are needed to support such developments.
Applications for Collaboration and Subversion
There are now vast numbers of devices 'around the edge' of the Internet that have very substantial processing capacity and storage and have high-capacity connections. During the late 1990s, initiatives were launched to coordinate these resources into collaboratories. The projects have achieved fruition, and it is now feasible for large-scale services to be orchestrated by organisations that have no large central processor. One family of projects refers to itself as 'grid computing'. The other family of projects is referred to as 'peer to peer' (P2P).
Internet Governance - by whom, and for whom?
The Australian Internet is no longer dependent on the personal efforts of Robert Elz and Geoff Huston, and the coordinative work needed to sustain the Internet as a whole was too large for Jon Postel even before his untimely demise. In 1998, the U.S. government orchestrated the establishment of a Californian not-for-profit corporation as the "technical coordination body for the Internet's name and numbering systems". There are many detractors of ICANN's constitution, and of its performance in relation to a range of matters. Corporations active in the business of the Internet are well-represented. The public (in the sense of individual users, corporate users, and people affected by its use) have little or no voice. Governments are represented, but not in a manner satisfactory to the majority of countries. A U.N.-sponsored talk-fest is in train, seeking to address the concerns of those countries. It is not clear whether it will address the public interest, or restrict its focus to the interests of governments.
Counter-Attacks by the Powerful
Given the subversion and the denial of powerful governments that is inherent in the current way in which the Internet works, it's no suprise that moves are afoot to adapt technologies as well as governance structures and processes. This is proceeding on several fronts.
Large corporations whose profits depend on revenue generated from copyright works have lobbied successfully for a succession of enhancements to copyright law. They have also invested a great deal of effort in wrapping the works in which they own copyright in layers of digital protection. The technologies are commonly referred to as 'Digital Rights Management' (DRM).
Powerful corporations and government agencies share a desire to exercise control over the actions of individuals and groups who act against their interests. There is a concerted effort to increase the ease with which devices are able to be tracked, and people associated with them.
There are likely to be a number of attempts in coming years to re-engineer the Internet from the ground up. There are many reasons for this, not least the considerable changes in underlying telecommunications technologies, processor technologies and applications that have arisen since the early 1970s. Governments and some corporations will have an interest in ensuring that their interests are better served, and will doubtless use the security imperative as the excuse for traceability and trapdoors with great repressive potential.
From Data to Meaning? to Knowledge??
A hypertext system is intended to enable people to navigate around a network of data. They use that inherently human possession called knowledge, to extract information on that data. Tim Berners-Lee implemented the simplest possible form of hypertext system, and called it the World Wide Web. It was successful because it was simple.
But everyone has been working hard to destroy the Web's simplicity ever since. (Not least, Tim Berners-Lee!). Metadata was added, in the form of meta-tags inserted within each web-page, to provide descriptive data about that page and its characteristics. Fortunately that achieved only limited success, and most metadata is stored where it should be, externally to the page.
HTML was a very messily simplified form of horrendously powerful and messy SGML. It is being progressively supplanted by XML, a logically clean but nonetheless very powerful version of SGML. XML has been further developed in order to support ways of describing not only documents but also structured data, by means of so-called Data Schemas. This particular kind of complexification of the Web is taking a long time to be assimilated, but does promise a great deal.
Most recently, Tim has been trying to move the Web closer towards being what he thinks of as a knowledge-web, through a project (or perhaps crusade) called the Semantic Web. This is meant to be achieved by establishing common controlled vocabularies, thesauri and 'ontologies' (a fashionable word for taxonomies), mappings among data definitions, and structured definitions of business processes. On that basis (Tim thinks), it will at last become feasible for software agents to navigate and transact act on behalf of users. Some of us are sceptical.
Additional reading/resources available here:
http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/CCCS04.html
Bio
Dr Roger Clarke is a consultant in strategic and policy aspects of electronic business, information infrastructure, and dataveillance and privacy. He is neither a communications engineer, nor a computer scientist, but holds degrees in Information Systems from the University of NSW (UNSW), and a doctorate from the Australian National University (ANU). He spent 1970-83 as an information systems professional, and 1984-95 as a senior academic. He is a Visiting Professor in eCommerce at the University of Hong Kong, a Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre at UNSW, and a Visiting Fellow in Computer Science at ANU. He has published scores of papers, all since 1995 at http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/, a site that attracts over 2 million hits per annum. He is a Board member of Electronic Frontiers Australia and of the Australian Privacy Foundation.