I just posted information about David Clark’s pending lecture on “The Internet Today and Tomorrow” on my blog, DrewClark.com, and further information is also avai
lable at the Information Economy Project web site at George Mason University School of Law. (I’m the Assistant Director at the Information Economy Project, which aims to bring the rigor of law & economics to issues of telecommunications and technology policy.)
The lecture, by Computer Science Professor David Clark, is the latest in the Information Economy Project’s “Big Ideas About Information” lecture series.
The Internet is now sufficiently embedded in society that it is regularly triggering social, economic and regulatory issues. The hot topics of today are network neutrality, network management, and the question of imposing regulatory limits on Internet service providers. However, those are just today’s hot topics. What will happen tomorrow? Can we speculate and perhaps get a bit ahead of the curve?
In this talk, Professor Clark will start with a perspective on today’s issue of network neutrality and the role of the Internet service provider, and will then look further into the future to look at some emerging issues, such as the role of the social network as a platform, the problems of building a more secure and available Internet, the emerging requirement for identity mechanisms, and the industrial implications of network virtualization and overlays. This talk will describe some new ideas from the technical community that might shift the landscape of regulation and industrial structure.
Resources:
- David Clark’s MIT web page
- Written statement at FCC public hearing on network management, Cambridge, Mass., February 25, 2008
- “Complexity of Internet Interconnections: Technology, Incentives and Implications for Policy” (with P. Faratin, P. Gilmore, S. Bauer, A. Berger and W. Lehr), Paper at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, 2007
- “Addressing Reality: An Architectural Response to Real-World Demands on the Evolving Internet” (with Karin Sollins, John Wroclawski and Ted Faber), Paper at ACM SIGCOMM 2003 Workshops.
- “Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow’s Internet” (with Karen R. Sollins, John Wroclawski and Robert Braden), Paper at SIGCOMM 2002.
David Clark is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he has worked since receiving his Ph.D. there in 1973. Since the mid 70s, Dr. Clark has been leading the development of the Internet; from 1981-1989 he acted as Chief Protocol Architect in this development, and chaired the Internet Activities Board. His current research looks at re-definition of the architectural underpinnings of the Internet, and the relation of technology and architecture to economic, societal and policy considerations. He is helping the U.S. National Science foundation organize their Future Internet Design program. Dr. Clark is past chairman of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies, and has contributed to a number of studies on the societal and policy impact of computer communications. He is co-director of the MIT Communications Futures Program, a project for industry collaboration and coordination along the communications value chain.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.