Present at the Future

by Ira Flatow

  “I want to teach young kids like I would have without Apple.” Which he did too, completing a lifelong dream. “I wanted to be an elementary-school teacher my whole life. In sixth grade I told my dad that I wanted to be an engineer first, like he was. But secondarily I wanted to be a fifth-grade teacher because my teacher was so important to me and was giving me the education that was going to take me through life and through this world. And all my life that thought was so important: I want to get back to education.

  “When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watched other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer, and it intrigued me. I wanted to do that.

  “Young children were always so important to me. Adults should treat children with more respect. We should put more monies in our schools. I grew up on that side of the coin.” His chance to help kids finally arrived. “I had a lot of money. I had much more money than you ever need in your life to live on.” So Wozniak donated computer labs to school districts. But his philanthropy did not quite scratch his itch to give.

  “So I decided you should really give yourself. I went and I started teaching computers to young kids, to fifth-graders at first, later to sixth-, seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-graders. I also started teaching teachers. And that was back in the days when we’d wire up the labs ourselves.”

  After a long and successful career that includes receiving two honorary doctorates, induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and being awarded the National Medal of Honor, the Woz regards his sense of humor as one of his most prized possessions.

  “I’ve been having a lot of fun every day. You know, pranks, jokes. But it actually started with a lifetime philosophy.” Wozniak came to the realization at the early age of 20 “that it was less good to be successful and better to have a laughing life. Laugh more than you frown all through your life. Because on the day you die, which one would you have said had the happier life, the better life? And so I put a lot of humor in my life.

  “I just believe [that] in whatever you’re going to do, even if it’s work, have a little bit of fun attitude about it. You can be happy.”

  PART X

  THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  WHITHER CYBERSPACE?

  They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year, equivalent to seven years in a regular person’s life. In other words, it’s evolving fast and faster.

  —VINTON CERF

  In the mid-1990s, very few people had heard of the Internet. I couldn’t get my publisher to let me write a book about the Internet. “What’s that? Who cares?” (They are always so up to date on the latest techno trends.) Today, there are more Internet-related books, articles, and blogs than you can shake a stick or point a mouse at. So predicting the future of the Internet is harder than reading a cloudy crystal ball. The Web is a world in a constant state of flux, from issues of legal control and governmental influence to the basic networking that holds the Internet together. Predicting the direction of the Internet is as risky as predicting the future of computing a generation ago. Some of the world’s most important technologists, from Bill Gates on down, were so wrong about the future of personal computing—and the Internet—that looking into our own crystal ball can be quite risky.

  But no matter what “next best thing” comes along, some basic questions remain the same:

  • Can the network continue to grow to take on new technologies? We’ve got telephones that talk over the Internet. We’ve music and video iPods. Who knows what Steve Jobs has in store for us? Will the information superhighway expand fast enough to meet the additional traffic all the new goodies and gadgets will require?

  • Is the Internet of the future a network like an electrical utility, where you pay for the amount of stuff that gets sent to you? Or is it like a cable service where your service provider controls the level and quality of your service, depending on how much you pay?

  • How can we be assured that the Internet remains secure? That people will not be eavesdropping on our Internet calls and messages?

  As it’s almost silly to look too far into the future, let’s look at what the Internet may look like by about 2017. Technologists, lawyers, and consumer advocates are already thinking in this time frame. Will people be doing things on the Internet similar to the things they are doing now? Communications is still the number one use of the Internet, says John Horrigan, associate director for research at the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington, D.C. Horrigan studies how people use the Internet.

  “People still gravitate toward e-mail and IM-ing [instant messaging] and those sorts of things. Following closely are Internet searches. People scratch their informational itches every day in a variety of ways by [going] online and doing a search. And we find, for those of you interested in the media business, that people go online increasingly for news and leave behind other types of media such as national TV newscasts and local newspaper readings. So lots more communications activities, particularly richly interactive types of applications, are popular among Internet users. As bandwidth increases, people are more comfortable in watching videos online and taking advantage of some of the entertainment applications.”

  STRIKE UP THE BANDWIDTH

  And there is plenty of room to grow. That bandwidth—the number of lanes on our info superhighway—is already high and underused. The basic structure of the Internet—its backbone of high-speed fiber optics—is not where the Internet’s limitations lie. The backbone is not the problem, says Tim Wu, professor of law at Columbia University and coauthor of the book Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World.

  “There’s a huge amount of capacity. Back in the 1990s, companies, even like Enron, built massive amounts of capacity into the backbone. The real bottleneck, and this has been true since about 1913, is the pipes and the wire that goes to people’s homes. Right now, we have the same networks—the cable and the telephone networks—that we’ve had since the 1960s. They’ve been updated a bit, but basically it’s the same old stuff, and the challenge over the next decade is whether we will really get the same kind of speeds on the backbone in the last mile, which is to say right to people’s homes.” Think about it. Do you have a high-speed fiber optics cable running into your living room? There is one on the telephone pole outside your home. But that’s where it ends. Bringing that “fiber” the last 50 yards into your home, from your curb to your couch, will be the next great high-tech reason to celebrate.

  “There are great incentives to upgrade the network simply because that’s what users want,” says Horrigan. “When we look at our surveys at the Pew Internet Project, most people who are signing on to broadband—and today forty-two percent of Americans have high-speed connections at home—sign on for the speed. They don’t tell us that ‘the price fell and I decided to switch.’ The longer people stay online, the more they want to do online, and their demand for speed increases as they get more experience on the Internet.”

  And what do they want to do with all this speed? Surprisingly, it’s not just to play video games. It’s what Horrigan calls “user-generated content.”

  “People like the speed in order to post things online about their lives, about what they’re doing. They like to post online their own creativity. Some of that stuff is not going to be widely interesting to the world at large, but it’s interesting to users and their social networks. So they’re going to want the entertainment services, but they’re going to want to have an Internet that enables them to express themselves online.”

  NETWORK NEUTRALITY

  Yes, this generation of Internet users is all about “me.” My photos. My blogs. My videos. My baby pictures. Look—and watch—me. But who will control who gets to see “me”? Wu wonders what your Internet provider of the future will look and feel like. He coined the phrase network neutrality to describe the issue and worries whether the Internet will remain the
wild and woolly, freely open space it is today, where all Internet users are treated equally.

  “There’s a basic philosophical divide between two approaches, one which is more like cable, which is basically what we’ve had since the ’70s, which is a centralized entity like the phone company or the cable company, and some producers create it. And the kind of world where people just throw up random things, and that’s what people watch. How you build the network, how the network gets built out will determine what kind of culture prevails.”

  Will it be something like what the Internet is now, a folksy kind of culture where people watch really bad quality videos of themselves because they think it’s funny or they read blogs almost as much as they’ll read the New York Times? Or will it be something more like the “old media” world, where the content is controlled by centralized decision makers? A place where you get to choose from a limited menu, as you do on cable television, and have to pay extra for “premium” services, as you do for premium cable channels such as HBO.

  “That’s the philosophical battle behind net neutrality,” says Wu. In other words, will the network remain neutral—equal—for all players, or will some parties have priority over it and make you pay extra for some services? “The Internet today is very decentralized. People come up with stuff, whether it’s on YouTube (where you can broadcast yourself ), whether it’s eBay or whether it’s people’s blogs.” The phone companies, who are increasingly becoming Internet providers, want to limit that freedom, says Wu. For example, they don’t like Google “free-riding on our pipes.” In effect, Wu says, they are saying, “We want to create premium, a tiered Internet. Maybe we want to start choosing more of what the user’s experience is like. Start tailoring it more, choosing one company over another. And there’s a big reaction to that among users, and mostly negative, because they like the world where, you know, a blog like Boing Boing can be as popular as CNN, and it’s four people who are just goofing around part time. And I think Americans like that folk-culture feeling from the Internet. They don’t really like big media, media consolidation. It’s one issue that has a lot of grassroots support.” So much so that Congress has been looking at various bills that would ensure net neutrality.

  “I hope that it retains its character as a decentralized medium that basically everyone uses, that just has a lot more bandwidth.”

  Perhaps the greatest challenge to the Internet of the future is keeping the trust that people put in it. The Internet was built on trust, defying the cynics at every step.

  “People have been saying since the ’90s that so many things wouldn’t happen on the Internet because no one trusts the Internet,” says Wu. “It’s been a bit of surprise over the last decade of how many things have happened on the Internet, even though it’s not as secure as some people might like. Look at the progress that has been made, purely on the basis of trust. Take Pierre Omidyar, who founded eBay. His whole founding principle was that people trust each other. And eBay has never been all that secure, but it’s managed to be successful nonetheless.” And now we have blogs and podcasts and other personal services that may not be very secure.

  As for the future? “I hope it looks like it’s a place that you can securely do all sorts of online transactions,” says Larry Peterson, chair of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. He’s the director of the PlanetLab Consortium, an experiment in new networking technologies. Looking forward, Internet security will remain at the top of his priority list.

  “That’s something that people are really worried about, between the phishing [attempts to steal your identity] and hijacking of connections and so on. We may be reaching a point that the average user loses trust in the Internet, and that’s clearly something we have to pay attention to over the next ten years.”

  This is a widespread problem, he says. It’s not just your obvious, secure online bank account, your Social Security number, or your Internet passwords; online content of all kinds is under attack, all the time. There are ways to listen in on your Internet voice conversations, even the encrypted ones. “It’s clearly an issue that we have to start paying attention to.”

  “The world is a very different place than it was thirty years ago,” says Horrigan. “The original assumption of the Internet was that everyone was a good guy and [that] if there were bad guys, they were on the outside. And all I had to do was create a safe world on the inside, and we all trusted each other and everything was fine.

  “But of course that’s not the case today. The adversaries aren’t just on the outside; they’re everywhere. And so we have to rethink who we trust and how we build a network up based upon those trust relationships.”

  KEEPING IT OPEN AND DECENTRALIZED

  “Despite all the security risks, the Internet has grown beyond expectations,” says Peterson. “But on the other hand, what I see happening is what I would call the Internet fragmenting into gated communities. This is almost like the neutrality aspect of the issue, that there are places you just can’t get to and the universal connectivity of the original Internet is deteriorating.”

  Internet experts call this the “Balkanizing effect,” the creation of destinations on the Internet that are off-limits to others. One prime example, says Wu, is China. “The Chinese government, to a degree which wasn’t true in the early Internet, has imposed the level of watchfulness and control over the Internet which is somewhat unprecedented.” Balkanization is often at the country level. “Countries have different ideas of what they would like the Internet to be,” and so the Chinese seek to control what their citizens can see on the Web or where they can surf. Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University Law School tested the Internet filtering capabilities of the Chinese government in 2002 and found almost 20,000 Web sites that were accessible from the United States but were not accessible from China. The sites ranged from those of the American Cancer Society and the MIT Alumni Association to the Irish Chronicle site and the official Web site of the state of Mississippi.

  Wu does not quite see Balkanization as a threat but rather as a phenomenon, particularly at the country level. “It’s not that countries won’t be able to talk to each other; it’s just that they will talk to each other less. When the Internet was much smaller a decade ago, there were only so many people on it, and so everybody always talked to each other. It’s becoming more and more of a national medium. So the Internet in Germany and in France is in German or in French,” or in China it’s in Chinese and in Japan it’s in Japanese. It just takes on more national characteristics.

  “It’s not necessarily bad. Japanese people love using the Internet from their strange-looking cell phones,” Wu says. Chinese people, for some reason, love chat rooms. Americans love blogs. They just like saying what they want to say. And so the different countries are kind of shaping the Internet to their own culture. It used to be a medium that was floating in outer space, and [when] you went there, you became this netizen.” Now it’s becoming part of national cultures. “And I don’t necessarily think that’s a crisis. I think that’s kind of natural, and I think that over the [next] 10 years, we’ll see more of that.”

  REDESIGN?

  The Internet is facing challenges that its original designers never dreamed of, says Horrigan, like the mobile devices that didn’t exist decades ago at the dawn of the Internet. “Originally the Internet assumed that the things that connected to it, the computers, were always plugged in, they never move. And clearly none of that’s true today, because we are a very mobile world and we have mobile devices and we have very small embedded devices that are going to be connected to the Internet very soon.” In addition, the rapid growth of video-sharing sites, such as YouTube, places great stresses on the Internet never envisioned by its inventors. “It’s these sorts of assumptions that are starting to break down and causing people to think if we stood back and had a chance to design this thing over again, how would we do it?”

  One of the stren
gths of the Internet design, says Wu, is that it really hasn’t been optimized for anything. “When it began it was used for e-mail and bulletin boards, and the World Wide Web grew on top of it, and then instant messaging grew on top of it, chat rooms grew on top of it, Google. All these things grew and grew and grew, and even phone service has been replicated. So that original design turned out to be a lot sturdier than people thought. And the question is whether it’s possible to improve on it.

  “The Internet was something that we were able to tinker with and innovate with at one point, and it’s now such a commercial success that we aren’t able to do that,” says Horrigan, speaking for Internet designers and researchers. “So we naturally gravitate toward the places that we can innovate, which is on top of the Internet.”

  And there are a lot of people who believe that the Internet is just fine and that we will just go off and build new services on top of it. But the real debate gets down to can we, in fact, solve all the problems that we foresee by only working on top of today’s Internet? Or do we really have to reconsider how it’s designed at the core?

  One of those problems that seems to never go away is ability to use the structure of the Internet’s network of computers to launch cyber attacks—to attack someone’s computer and bring it down. Take a recent cyber attack on CNN.com, says Peterson, where hackers “commandeered a thousand ‘zombies,’ machines that were infiltrated around the world, and were made to start sending traffic to CNN.com. Such a load was put on their system that no one else could get to it. The CNN Web site and its services and employees were effectively shut down. This is a common cyber attack called ‘denial of service.’