IP Everywhere - state of the Internet 2000 http://cookreport.com/ipevery

Published today, this is the introductory essay to:

IP Everywhere:  Riding the Internet Tsunami

The State of the Internet 2000

At the beginning of the new millennium the Internet is globally 
triumphant.  Blindly embraced by politicians who do not understand 
it, the Internet is touted as the engine that will power the economy 
of the new century.  The lover's embrace by the rich and powerful has 
helped to make it a fad which is increasingly in control of the stock 
market.  Internet companies are too often valued not out of sound 
understanding of their business models and cash flow dynamics but 
because they are Internet companies. The Internet has emerged in the 
1990s as perhaps the supreme "disruptive" technology in the sense 
popularized by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator's 
Dilemma.
Christensen found that "disruptive" technologies generally "under 
perform established products in mainstream markets," however they are 
generally cheaper and simpler to use than the sustaining technologies 
that they ultimately dethrone.  Examined from a slightly different 
perspective, "disruptive technologies give customers more than they 
currently need or are willing to pay for.  [Source is TeleGeography 
2000 . Review follows.] This is one reason why such technologies are 
usually commercialized first by customers serving niche markets such 
as data networks or CLECs."
Because "disruptive" technologies bring to market a such a radically 
different value proposition than was here-to-fore available, those 
practitioners of the older sustaining technologies find themselves 
unable to quickly adjust their business models and infrastructure to 
compete head-to-head with the new "disruptive" technologies.  They 
may also be constrained by the very service models which have made 
them essential to their customers.
To name just two examples central to the Internet's triumph as a 
disruptive network: in the last three years,  we have gone from the 
ancient sustaining wisdom that telecom networks must be intelligent 
at the center, to the new paradigm demanded by the Internet--that the 
intelligent devices at the edge of the network must find nothing in 
the middle that gets in the way of communication between them.  Also 
we have traveled from the certainty of knowledge that publishing is 
an activity whereby elite gate keepers package knowledge for the 
masses to a world where every computer owner can become a publisher. 
In this new "disruptive," Internet-driven world the old realities of 
our once comfortable industrial world are turned sideways if not 
inside out.  The trail that has been blazed by the new media and 
mirrored by the old media, is simply to hop on the bandwidth wagon, 
and hype processes that are not well understood yet. Jeff Bezos, the 
CEO of Amazon.com, a company that has yet to report a profit, becomes 
Time magazine's "Man of the Year."
This report will give an in depth look at reasons for the success of 
the disruptive Internet.   We have technology analysts, e-commerce 
analysts and legal experts bringing their respective expertise to 
bear as they tell their separate stories of who is winning and who is 
losing.  What we lack is a look at the larger picture of how the 
interaction of these areas will determine success and failure over 
the longer term.
This report will also examine in depth certain critical areas of 
technology change.  As it does so, it will show how the efforts of 
pre-Internet telecom entities to channel and shape the legal and 
political control of this technology no longer fit the competitive 
multiple protocol environment under which these entities must work. 
The processes developed to service the pre-Internet, circuit 
switched, telecommunications systems simply do not afford policy 
makers any way to deal fairly and harmoniously with Internet 
disruptions.  There are no longer appropriate pigeonholes and 
regulatory boxes that can sustain the old way of doing things. 
Democracy and technology no longer mix. If technology is to be 
consistent with public values, the public must understand the 
technology and be able to move from that understanding to a grasp of 
the stakes.
Understanding the stakes is difficult. Technology itself is 
increasingly complex. Point A does not always lead to Point B, even 
if Event C occurs. The impact of a new technology on is increasingly 
difficult to judge.  Consequently we are likely to find that many of 
the assumptions on the basis of which policy has been developed over 
decades are no longer valid.  For example this report will show that 
the buyer's market for bandwidth is filled the potential for 
financial peril as well as profit.  And it will show that the obscure 
debates over end-to-end network transparency can exert transformative 
influence over how the Internet is organized.
Ultimately, as the system grows sufficiently complex with fewer and 
fewer people competent or even able to direct its course, some may 
ask when does chaos set in and take control?  Or when does Internet 
coordination become merely a series  of panic stricken interventions 
where the "coordinators" lurch from one crises to the next while 
trying to keep all the "vested" interests in their same positions of 
dominance? Already technology that our political leaders do not 
understand is driving the formation of public policy.  Thus, 
democratic values independent of the technology are no longer the 
primary public policy goals. These are additional "disruptive" 
effects of the triumphant Internet.
Those who dare to assume the role of enterprise strategist in the 
midst of these changes must understand that their successful 
stewardship will depend on their grasp not only of what Gilder calls 
the ascendant technologies.  They must also develop at least two 
other skill sets.  One is an understanding that, as Lessig has shown 
so well, the success and visibility of the Internet has brought to it 
a level of attention where the legislators and the regulators will 
impact it whether the rest of us like it or not.  [For Lessig's Code: 
and Other Laws of Cyberspace  see 
http://cookreport.com/lessigbook.shtml ]
The other is a skill set that will help strategists to evaluate the 
stakes behind the questions of what will become the engineering 
agenda for the Internet.  Compromises have been made in network 
management that can spell  trouble further down the road. To scale 
network growth and cope with available IPv4 numbers, design decisions 
compromising end-to-end connectivity were made in the early 1990s. As 
the long IETF discussion published in the February 2000 COOK Report 
[and reprinted pp. 259-272 below] shows, there is a fallout from 
these decisions. The fallout is an incipient battle over how some of 
the intelligent edge devices of the network will communicate through 
the center to their intelligent counterparts at the opposite edges. 
The approaches taken now as to early implementation versus delay and 
revision of IPv6 will impact the diversity of the infrastructure of 
the future Internet. Arcane but very important debates like these 
will determine whether issues of control over end-to-end uniformity 
and network transparency take priority over everything else. Will 
time spent toward these ends mean that other more critical 
engineering concerns are ignored? A feared consequence is that the 
Internet's ability to continue to scale may be endangered.
Technology Changes

The year just ended saw a continuation of the bandwidth revolution 
begun by the real take off of WDM technologies in 1997. New 
developments in DWDM  (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) and optical 
switching have further multiplied the bandwidth available from a 
global binge of fiber deployment. A revolutionary drop in the cost of 
data storage combined with increased network speeds is making it 
possible to deliver data across a wide area network more quickly and 
more cost effectively than across the bus on the motherboard of a 
single computer. These changes made the dream of the network becoming 
the computer - a dream that was first articulated earlier in the 
decade -seem likely to become true.  They also made possible the rise 
of a new application service provider industry.
The year also saw the full flowering of new global telecom providers 
built on the inexpensive infrastructure made possible by the new 
technology. Qwest, Level 3, Metromedia, Williams, Enron, Global 
Telesystems, Global Crossing, Next Link, Teleglobe, and Above Net to 
varying degrees are all examples of these new telecom giants. While 
Teleglobe has been around for a number of years in a rather different 
form, and Williams is a reincarnation of an earlier venture, all of 
these new players with the exception of Metromedia have been profiled 
within the pages of the COOK Report.  Questions of interconnection 
and peering are still critical.  Equinix's neutral Internet Business 
Exchanges to be built globally under contract with Bechtel will be 
the most high profile model for fitting the new backbone players 
together and enabling cost effective interconnection.
As bandwidth consumption and fiber deployment soar the purchase of 
bandwidth has become especially tricky.  Prices of bandwidth bought 
in bulk over long periods of time are plummeting and options of 
purchase are increasing.  (See Figure I  Fiber Optic Cost Trends and 
Figure X Bandwidth Market Matrix from TeleGeography 2000 on pages 2. 
and 161.)
It is a buyer's market but a dangerous one as AboveNet found out when 
14 months ago it paid over 8 million dollars for a 25 year IRU on a 
trans Atlantic STM-1 only to see the price of such an IRU plummet to 
less than 3 million a year later.  Options are available for those 
who make this kind of mistake.  MetroMedia Fiber Network (MMFN) 
bought AboveNet last year assuring it of a direct and affordable 
supply of bandwidth.  As David Isenberg pointed out in late December, 
according to MMFN's president, "a DS3 from the telco costs $3,000 a 
month, and a comparable MMFN fiber costs about $5,000. But the fiber 
can be lit at OC-12 - [a speed that is]14 times faster than DS3 - for 
$500 more per month (assuming 10-year depreciation). This works out 
to about $400 per DS3 per  month." The lesson is that as new 
companies are built on shifting assets and technology, agile fast 
moving players will find many options.  But, as the market 
solidifies, such options won't last indefinitely.
An important new business involving the sale of surplus bandwidth at 
exchanges is beginning to emerge.  We learned about RateXchange in a 
phone conversation with Ross Mayfield its CEO on December 30.  In New 
York and Los Angeles Mayfield is running what he calls The Real-Time 
Bandwidth eXchange.  He says that RTBX is a switch-based exchange 
that facilitates the entire transaction of bandwidth between 
interconnected carriers. Benefits include significantly lower 
transaction costs, anonymous trade, immediate delivery, and guarantee 
of payment. He seeks to create a win-win situation where an ISP with 
a temporary bandwidth surplus can sell bandwidth to an ISP with a 
shortage.  His ultimate goal is to commoditize trading in bandwidth 
by means of the sale of contracts for future delivery.
When Web based interfaces for creating in almost-real-time 
single-wavelength circuits between two points become common, 
Mayfield, and by then many other players, intend to have created the 
infrastructure to make this possible.  Given that the Internet for 
the past few years has been in a blind race to make enough bandwidth 
available to meet huge demands, this technology will be likely to 
give a welcome rationality to this marketplace.  For the first time 
it should offer a means of efficiently and quickly bringing available 
bandwidth into balance with demand, and thus allow venture 
entrepreneurs to build new infrastructure where it will be used 
profitably
As the February COOK Report's lead article on the state of wireless 
shows, we have many new developments in wireless reaching their 
maturity and pulling the whole structure towards more ubiquitous, 
always-on connectivity and applications.  Wireless, becoming digital 
in 1999, became also broadband.  Almost all the kinds, number and 
varieties of activities conducted via the wired Internet are now 
beginning to be carried out on the Internet in wireless form.  This 
vast growth of wireless infrastructure has fed on itself to lead to a 
continued explosion of net use and net traffic. Large growth in cable 
and DSL connectivity in 1999 also contributed to the increase in 
traffic and in the number of always-on connections.
In 1999 the Internet reached a critical mass where every player in 
commerce and business had to have a presence.  It became unthinkable 
not to have an Internet strategy.  The growth in Internet 
participation fed on itself and made possible business models which 
came to subsume every part of human economic activity. These changes 
mean that we are looking at a telecom world in which the old 
standards of evaluation fail us.
Technology Changes Divide Management into Irreconcilable Camps

The revolution has given us two opposed ways of thinking about and 
acting to achieve network organization.  One may be described as the 
Bellhead intelligent network and the other as the Nethead stupid net 
work. [See http://www.tmdenton.com/netheads3.htm and p.206 below.] In 
the first intelligence resides in expensive complex smart switches in 
the center of the telephone network linking stupid edge device 
telephones. In the second fat bit pipes linked by idiot savant 
routers connect intelligent computers on end user desks. The 
intelligent "Bellhead" network is generally organized to be run from 
the top down by an extremely rigid hierarchy.  The business model is 
a monopolist and feudal one with the lord of the manor ensconced in 
his hilltop castle.
The "Nethead" architecture is organized through the creation of 
structure by cooperating autonomous groups. In addition to being 
important mental constructs, both architectures are now grounded in 
billions of dollars of competing and not generally compatible 
infrastructures. These competing infrastructures are the foundations 
on which telecommunications, electronic  commerce and individual 
access to vast knowledge will be determined in the new century. The 
older infrastructure (the Bellhead) is inherently more subject to 
vertical integration and organization.  In the Bellhead environment, 
vertical, centralized, and rigidly-controlled hierarchies  are used 
to enable a single centrally determined and centrally priced palette 
of communication services, while the newer Nethead companies more 
often tend to be organized horizontally as companies whose market 
strength is in the delivery of one or more layers of the protocol 
stack.
This report proposes the outlines of a new business model structure 
for identifying and understanding Internet players who will prosper 
and ride the disruptive wave successfully. Growth areas in Nethead 
oriented companies are for specialists in bandwidth, interconnection, 
content hosting, application outsourcing, email.  A player here is 
either an infrastructure-providing specialist, or one who coordinates 
and manages technology specialties horizontally to provide services 
to end users. At the transport, infrastructure-providing, level you 
have the continued growth of new telecom greenfield players such as 
Level 3, Williams and GTS to name but three.  These companies are 
taking advantage of new technology and new market conditions to grow 
from nothing into billion dollar plus companies in only two or three 
years although the long term judgment of the market is not yet in as 
to their appropriate valuation.
Opposed to this new disruptive Internet business model is the old 
solid and stable vertically integrated telecom model followed in the 
United States by the ILECs. ATT, with its attempt to buy control of 
the cable industry to have a foundation from which to deliver all 
telecom services, fits into the same category.  MCI WorldCom with its 
attempt to become one of the biggest world wide integrated phone 
companies by acquiring Sprint also exhibits the telephone headed 
business strategy of a gigantic vertical integrator of dissimilar 
technologies and services.  By the same token the AOL Time Warner 
merger represents the old industrial age vertically integrated model 
of the marriage of content and a delivery mechanism for the content.
The Two Approaches to Slug it Out in 2000

We find that one battle of the year 2000 is to be between the 
horizontal versus vertically integrated business models. The 
horizontal model that is TCP/IP-based over gigabit or 10 gig Ethernet 
over fiber - a stupid network with smart peripheries where new low 
cost services can be cheaply and quickly inter connected like lego 
blocks. Internet players tend not to be vertically integrated. 
Instead they are bandwidth and transport players like Williams, 
Enron, Global Telesystems or end user aggregations of services like 
MindSpring, Earthlink, or AOL that run over someone else's 
infrastructure.
Disruptive Internet companies are nimble and quick compared to the 
older players like WorldCom that are still driven by empire building 
in search of elusive economies of scale. In a vertically integrated 
company, you may think you can cut costs by eliminating duplicative 
services, but instead you have a management nightmare of complex 
systems where glitches can mushroom into multiple week outages like 
MCI's frame relay collapse during the summer of 99.  Or ATT as it 
attempts to build what it sees as the "network of the future" out of 
CATV policy and infrastructure.  These players tend to see the 
Internet in terms of what has come before - in other words in terms 
of what is already familiar to them.  What has gone before is 
regional feudal monopolies, based on exclusive land-based rights and 
exclusive land-based responsibilities overseen by public regulators 
enforcing a social benefit/social cost analysis.  And it well may be 
that this model may be with us longer than we would like.  We should 
not think it can be so easily replaced, or that such replacement 
would have only good consequences.
Can the old vertically integrated intelligent network players 
compete? Or should they have some kind of protected quid-pro-quo 
status as the baseline common carrier? It will be much more difficult 
when wireless means cannibalization of their local loop T-1 circuit 
income rather than new income.  Look for them to engage in regulatory 
plays like ICANN.
The horizontally organized players can see the disruptions coming 
much more clearly, push the development envelope better, and achieve 
economies of scale by specializing in transport services, or storage 
services or application outsourcing. The vertical integration of MFS 
into the realm of its telephone company operators was what made the 
Network Access Points (NAPs) fail with WorldCom in the 1996 -1997 
period.  (Some maintain that with a carrier running the NAP, it was 
then put in the counter productive position of competing with its own 
customers.)
In contrast horizontal aggregation of services will enable Equinix's 
neutral exchange points.  Vertical integration is needed to make all 
the pieces of the intelligent bellhead network operate and to pay for 
relatively few and very expensive centralized switches.  To make 
vertical integration work, one needs to control as much of the 
telecom environment in which one operates as possible. Even so some 
astute observers point out that, as the Internet industry continues 
to grow, even the horizontally oriented Internet companies are likely 
to make vertical market plays if they are sufficiently cash wealthy 
and driven to expand market share. We must strive for educational 
processes that will make clear to regulators and the public alike 
what economic and policy consequences will flow from the two 
different approaches to the market.
Ignored Perils of Scalability and Architecture

The plug and play nature of Internet interoperability means that the 
over all network can be quite hierarchical, because there is room for 
many companies of many different sizes.  Consequently, the management 
of each company can be quite flat and and  be able to respond rapidly 
to changing conditions.   Internet interoperability encourages 
specialization and rapid technology development because the 
specialized pieces will fit together and work together.  However the 
Internet is now set to begin paying penalties for its success.  The 
triumph of IP in global telecom has made legacy companies believe it 
is critical to their futures to dominate the implementation of IPv6 
in order to preserve illusory and unattainable uniformity for their 
goal of continuing  in central control of network operations.
Let us summarize the argument we have just made. The Internet is 
having a disruptive impact in three areas of global importance. 
First, disruption in global commerce.  As trade of goods and services 
migrate to Internet locations, then individual economic power is 
derived from one's position within and one's subtle understanding of 
the new infrastructure.
Second, disruption in the restructuring of global telecommunication 
services to accommodate Internet requirements and efficiencies. As we 
have pointed out, the Internet is enabling new infrastructure that 
can provide all manner of telecommunication services at a tiny 
fraction of prior costs.
Third, disruption by the revolution of storage technology which 
re-enforces and amplifies the plummeting costs of bandwidth 
provision.  As a result, some computers will expand into 
configurations which look to them something like local intranets, 
with extended storage lodged on the Internet rather than inside the 
case, because in some situations, external Internet storage will be 
cheaper and safer than local storage  options.  This trend toward 
external Internet storage may shape the net into the global 
repository for information and knowledge. While the Internet was 
originally designed to be decentralized and not subject to single 
points of failure or control, its current commercial success makes 
today's Internet a target for desperate and daring stratagems to both 
obtain ownership wealth and the privileges and prerogatives of 
control, containment, restriction, and punishment.
Control Points:  Ephemeral or Real?

One view of how services in the new telecom world will be delivered 
is by an architecture of an idealized Internet where TCP /IP will 
always be able to be sent from end-to-end.  Because of a series of 
compromises involving private address numbers, corporations now sit 
behind firewalls that demand the imposition of many translation 
devices.  Thebellheads see these devices (NAT boxes) as obstacles to 
the imposition of a centrally controlled communication path like 
IPv6. The betheads don't see any of the bellhead's reasons for 
concern.  They are happy to use multiple protocols and bridges over 
otherwise non interoperable network links.  The nethead's outlook 
focuses on extensibility while the bellheads, through trying to 
influence the roll out of IPv6, focus on control.
ICANN which has garnered most of its support from bellheaded legacy 
organizations, has waged a generally successful campaign to sell 
itself to the press. The major press, having nothing other than 
ICANN's sound bytes from which to claim a clue, generally has no idea 
that anything is amiss. ICANN meanwhile is determined to error on the 
side of control concluding that it has the ability to enforce a 
uniform roll out for IPv6.
The two sides, one riding a disruptive technology and the other 
trying to extend the life span of the old sustaining technologies, 
sit in a hostile face off as they roll out competing business plans 
for the 'converged' future of voice and data.  But the Cook Report 
argues that the netheads and the bellheads are fighting about 
dominance and control issues, when there is emerging evidence that 
they must, instead, focus on scaling and inter operability issues. 
We are very sensitive to Sean Doran's concerns about scaling of 
network architecture and routing which will enable the Internet to 
cope with the coming onslaught of broadband soon to be generated by 
the increasing numbers of intelligent devices in homes and small 
businesses at the edge of the network. [See pages 150 - 152 below.] 
But in the current competitive environment this is very little talked 
about.
Therefore one must consider whether the Internet technical community 
while doing battle over the presumed uniformity necessary for IPv6 is 
actually depriving itself of the time and effort needed to face more 
intractable problems of scaling, including protocol diversity. Up to 
this point the Internet has scaled by a series of kludges like the 
use of CIDR and RFC 1597 assignment of numbers for private intranets. 
These are kludges that leave no one happy.  While the Internet is not 
likely to suddenly fall off a cliff, if these issues are not attended 
to, performance is likely to get uglier and less reliable.
Thus we predict that what is otherwise an arcane dispute among 
network engineers is likely to become a basis for an operational 
strategy attuned to the structure, economics, and philosophy of the 
vertically integrated telcos of the majority of the planet. These 
conflicting issues meet head on in the distribution of IPv6 and over 
ICANN which has placed itself in a position from which it could 
attempt to coordinate the implementation in an effort to provide the 
uniformity that the bellheads want and believe they need in order to 
stabilize their world.
We find that  a vertically integrated market strategy is usually 
telco operated and at odds with the horizontally oriented and more 
cooperative Internet market strategy.  However in the current chaotic 
period of expansion and emphasis on building market share, these 
categories do not always hold.  For the changes that we have 
chronicled in the COOK Report for the past eight years are focused on 
building market share as well as in the creation of new, successful 
businesses based on openings provided by the "disruptive" technology. 
When this happens, a business like 3Com may mature to a point where 
the MBAs looking at the balance sheets and stock prices begin to 
drive things more than the engineers.
As one astute observer confided to us: "vertical integration has 
become the way that everyone is trying to rule the Internet economy, 
and I have seen very specific presentations from 3 Com and others 
saying explicitly that this is what they are hoping to do.  It's the 
way to maximize shareholder value, but at the expense of an Internet 
that works well and that is user-friendly (by which I mean users that 
can innovate, not just click mouses). Similarly, I believe that we're 
past the nethead vs bellhead debate into something far scarier, which 
is where netheads and bellheads both realize that they're going to 
have to integrate their networks.  Moreover they may be committing to 
doing so even when they know that they don't have time to agree about 
big chunks of the end result.  In other words, while the PSTN may be 
getting dumber, intelligence is being injected into the Internet in 
some interesting and unexpected ways."
Under such conditions amazingly powerful technology will almost 
certainly run into snaffus originating with kludges in protocol 
design and IP numbering made in the first years of the take off of 
the commercial Internet.  When this happens more than web site 
performance will suffer. Also the profits of those companies which 
have marched forward fueled by nothing but blind faith in the 
continuing scalability and robustness of the Internet will take 
severe hits.
Alternatives?

So are there alternatives? Ed Gerck who has participated in some of 
these debates has some wise suggestions in a long IETF discussion 
reprinted  in the February 2000 COOK Report. Gerck advocates that the 
battle should not be thought of as either the uniform roll out of 
IPv6 or the failure of IPv6 and thus being fated to live with a 
network with some hosts blocked by firewalls or NAT boxes.   There is 
a third way marked by diverse protocols that can inter operate.
When we asked him for further comment he replied "I saw no 
counter-argument raised to it - rather, it fell like an eye-opener to 
the reality that Nature is based on diversity. Those that believe in 
an uniform Internet as the only way to achieve end-to-end security 
are actually still locked in the network paradigm of the 70's where 
network administration dictated orders to the entire network, by 
design. So, they will most naturally fight a multiple-protocol 
Internet, because they cannot intellectually cope with it."
"However, in the Internet paradigm of the 90's, now truly as networks 
of private networks in a progression over 30 years as catalogued by 
Stef,  [Einar Stefferud]we already have multiple protocols in 
coexistence at various levels - what matters, so we have learned, is 
not that there must be one unique protocol at every place and time, 
but that different protocols, at different places, at different 
times, and doing different things are indeed able to work together 
when the objectives are the same. And this, quite revealingly for the 
success of the Internet IMO, is how we humans prefer to work 
together, how commerce thrives and how we can enrich each other's 
living experience."
"So, communication protocols such as IPv6 must not be based on an 
excluding model, where they must kill any other protocol, but on an 
including model where interfaces are provided for backward and 
forward compatibility. Otherwise, even if IPv6 would be adopted by 
force on 90% of the Internet - this would still leave out 10% (which 
is projected at 40 million end-users in 2000) and would immediately 
raise questions about IPv7, IPv8 and so on. The only way to address 
the backward- and forward-looking questions without requiring the 
whole world to change standards at whatever cost at whatever time, is 
to provide for inter operation."
"Thus, that is why I wrote that tools for IPv4/IPv6 inter operation 
will be needed .... and valued, including NATs as a fundamental 
building block - even though they began as a stumbling block in 
another context," Gerck concluded.
Consequently, one must weigh whether the Internet technical community 
may be actually depriving itself of the time and effort needed to 
face more intractable problems of scaling, including protocol 
diversity.  Those who would pretend to do large scale strategic 
planning in the midst of the Internet revolution had better 
assimilate the lessons of Larry Lessig's Code and Other Laws of 
Cyberspace.   As the Internet moves into the legal and political 
arena the question for analysts to ponder is not a naïve belief in 
the unregulatability of the Internet.  They need a much clearer 
understanding that  the operation and impact of the Internet can be 
determined by the legal system, by the way in which its dominant 
protocols are coded, by the architectural environment in which it 
operates and by the local customs that determine what behavior is 
socially and commercially ethical and acceptable.
Gerck's statement about the need for inter operability tools for IPv4 
and IPv6 is a good summary of why Lessig's seemingly arcane issue of 
network architecture and control is politically very important.  For 
in Lessig's language, it offers yet another example of how the 
technical decisions that change the shape of Internet architecture 
will indeed render it more subject to legal and regulatory control.
The "disruptive" Internet is in the midst of what looks to be a 
general triumph.    During our eight years of reporting on the growth 
of the commercial Internet, the COOK Report has developed a unique 
perspective that synthesizes technology issues with their operational 
and engineering counterparts. We believe that synthesis of these 
intricate processes as described in detail in IP Everywhere, falls 
outside the scope of more specialized analysts. We also believe that 
those who become familiar with these complex  developments will be 
able to formulate more successful business strategies.  For the first 
time the technology is likely to be as much affected by policy 
decisions of network design and global regulation as by the older 
unregulated Internet frontier mentality which drove the mad rush to 
add users, scale the network, and increase market share.  Winning 
players must take into account the daily onslaught of new technology. 
They must also make the right judgments about the governance and 
standards wars, and the rapid shift in market economics. The winners 
will be those who get the  right answers to this complex mix of 
questions.
Gordon Cook January 24, 2000

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