Internet Architecture and Innovation Reviews
October 22, 2010 by admin
Internet Architecture and Innovation
- ISBN13: 9780262013970
- Condition: New
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The Internet’s remarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. New applications continually enable new ways of using the Internet, and new physical networking technologies increase the range of networks over which the Internet can run. Questions about the relationship between innovation and the Internet’s architecture have shaped the debates over open access to broadband networks, network neutrality, nondiscriminatory network management, and future Internet architecture. In Internet Architecture and Innovation, Barbara van Schewick explores the economic consequences of Internet architecture, offering a detailed analysis of how it affects the economic environment for innovation.
Van Schewick describes the design principles on which the Internet’s original architecture was based—modularity, layering, and the end-to-end arguments—and shows how they shaped the original architecture. She analyzes in detail how the original architecture affected innovation—in particular, the development of new applications—and how changing the architecture would affect this kind of innovation.
Van Schewick concludes that the original architecture of the Internet fostered application innovation. Current changes that deviate from the Internet’s original design principles reduce the amount and quality of application innovation, limit users’ ability to use the Internet as they see fit, and threaten the Internet’s ability to realize its economic, social, cultural, and political potential. If left to themselves, network providers will continue to change the internal structure of the Internet in ways that are good for them but not necessarily for the rest of us. Government intervention may be needed to save the social benefits associated with the Internet’s original design principles.
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(out of 3 reviews)
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Review by Marvin Ammori for Internet Architecture and Innovation
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This is an important and brilliant book, which I consider required reading for anyone interested in or serious about the Internet or innovation.
I have written a review of this book on my blog ([...]) and on the Huffington Post.
As I say there, this book is one of the very few books in the field of Internet policy that is in the same league as Larry Lessig’s Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0, in 2000, and Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, in 2006, in terms of its originality, depth, and importance to Internet policy and other disciplines. I expect the book to affect how people think about the Internet; about the interactions between law and technical architectures in all areas of law; about entrepreneurship in general. I also think her insights on innovation economics, which strike me as far more persuasive than lawyers’ usual assumptions, should influence “law and economics” thinking for the better.
Books this good don’t come along every day–or even every year-and I’m already late to the praise-party. Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig (the trail-blazing cyberlaw champion) recommended it in the New York Times this week; Susan Crawford (a law professor who served as a top White House advisor) recommended it in an op-ed in Salon/GigaOm yesterday; Brad Burnham, the venture capitalist who was featured earlier this week in the NYT’s Room for Debate, also posted an endorsing review on his blog. MIT engineering professor David Reed (one of the key architects of the IP protocol, inventor of the UDP protocol) praises it on the book jacket.
It is not easy material–the Internet’s technologies and how innovation actually evolves–but she writes for a general audience, not a technologist or lawyer, and you will learn a lot from, and be challenged by, the ideas in this book.
Review by jomamma for Internet Architecture and Innovation
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A good part of the book is devoted to the history and technical architecture of the internet. Light reference to the burning issue of net neutrality and extensive discussion of its surrogate “end-to-end arguments” of the narrow and broad types is puzzling. The internet is not end-to-end but based on hops, box 3.4, as stated on p. 384, so what is the big deal with end-to-end hop-less connectivity, except for real-time communication which was not part of the original design of the internet? This is the first time I learned that Salzer, Reed and Clark (1981) take credit for original “end-to-end” arguments (p. 58), overshadowing Vinton Cerf, Bob Kahn and Jon Postel who “invented” the Internet well before 1981. van Schewich ought to explain why she considers Salzer et al phrase “end-to-end” to be the catchphrase and linguistic keyword for the entire book, instead of relegating it to a mere historical artifact.
Ignoring the unnecessary exposition on the Application/ Transport/ Internet and Link layers, known to every Cisco technician, van Schewich deserves credit for building the next two sections of the book: Net Neutrality and competition, and Net Neutrality and innovation. van Schewich comprehensively surveys the literature of the internet + competition (Varian genre) and internet+innovation (von Hippel genre). The conclusions are predictably unpalatable to the financial health of Comcast and Verizon, that erosion of transparent “end-to-end” connectivity (net neutrality) would be anti-competitive and would stifle innovation.
Review by R. Bennett for Internet Architecture and Innovation
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The principal problem with the book is the author’s lack of understanding of the engineering process. Engineers, unlike law professors writing books about engineering, don’t work from first principles like the Internet’s retrospective end-to-end arguments principle; they make tradeoffs and design toward a goal or set of goals. Thus, when the Internet was built the project manager, Bob Kahn, adapted a design that had already been proved in the French research network CYCLADES rather than starting with a blank slate. CYCLADES designer Louis Pouzin went with an “architecture” that was appropriate for a research network, and not very suitable for an everyday network for unskilled people. The Internet has proved difficult to manage and expensive to operate because this research-centric design is still there. Security, privacy, viruses, spam, and denial of service attacks raise the price and lower the utility of the Internet, all a direct consequence of its organization.
The author is right that the Internet’s organization makes it easy for some application programmers to bring new information services on-line, but wrong about the scope of the innovations it permits. Regardless of the system architecture, the services offered by a network constrain application developers. The telephone network is innovation-limiting because it’s a slow, narrow-band system, not because it lacks end-to-end architecture. The end-to-end architecture is misleading in any case, as any network has an end-to-end element.
Because the Internet offers poor support for performance-intensive real-time applications (gaming, video conferencing, other forms of communication-oriented rather than content-oriented apps) the designers of these applications pay an innovation tax in the form of extra effort that effectively subsidizes content-oriented applications. They also end up bypassing most of the Internet through Content Delivery Networks and managed services. So the author is wrong regarding her claim that the Internet is the best of all possible networks from the innovator’s perspective; it’s good for some applications, but not for others.
If you must read this book for your job or a school assignment, wait for the Kindle version if you can (MIT Press says it will be three years from now;) it’s just a bit tedious on paper.