The Road Less Travelled

Developments within research and education communities are much faster and more revolutionary than the general-purpose Internet

There is no doubt that as we enter the 2lst century the Internet has become a commodity for large parts of the world's population. Political and economic practices vis-a-vis computer-mediated communication networks are expanding and changing faster than economists and governments can understand.

Yet many of the supposed "new" services of a supposed "new" economy are actually based on technology that was commonplace in the academic and research community for decades. In fact, research and education communities are already embracing far more advanced networks, services and applications. Developments in this area are much faster and more revolutionary than the general-purpose Internet.

Old Dogs, Old Tricks

While pundits ponder over the demise of the dot-coms, the truth of the matter is that it was something to be expected. Indeed, for those familiar with the cycle of failure pertaining to startup companies, there was nothing to suggest that "new" economy businesses were immune from the laws of economics.

Some had the foresight to merge basic economic principles with that of emerging trends of neo-liberalism. One of these visionaries was Jack Gordon who, way back in 1993, pointed out the fallacies of an economy based on freelance labour.1 Although at that time the notion of "new" economy had not yet existed (Gordon referred to companies operating under such a paradigm as "high performance organisations"), the characteristics were nonetheless the same: work is organised along the lines of projects, much like that of film productions, in where people would converge and then disperse, each person a freelancer, selling his or her talents on an open market.

Gordon illustrated the shortcomings of such a framework through the analogy of actors: most spend their days waiting tables and parking cars than working on exciting projects. The irony of this is that Gordon couldn't realise how prophetic his words were to be: according to a Wall Street Journal report in mid-March of this year, 15% of those waiting tables in New York are former employees of a dot-com.

The statistics presented by Gordon almost ten years ago should have been sobering fact: that is, 80% of all startups fail within the first five years; of those remaining, 80% of those fail within the next five. Thus, what we have seen with the demise of the dot-coms is simply the realisation of basic economic principles.

Unfortunately, for many within the digital age reality is a hard thing to accept. As a result, instead of going back to school and doing a refresher course, many have chosen to shift the blame instead. Hence, what we now are witnessing is the search for a scapegoat by "net entrepreneurs" and the digerati, and those who still believe in their hollow promises and dreams.

Some appear totally oblivious and/or ignorant to what is going on. Joe Burns of the HTML Goodies site wrote in a recent newsletter of his awkward experience when he suddenly realised that the new direction of the search engine world was one of "Pay to Play". 2 His explanation for this "sudden" shift: search-engines over-filled themselves with "space junk" as tens of thousands of pages were rolling in.

While trying to convince his readers that search engine operators were being overwhelmed, and that paying a fee to feature a page was the only (and best) avenue open to them, he clearly overlooked one important detail: it's not just search engines, but all sites which until recently had provided information for free. He totally ignores the fact that companies that rely heavily on the Internet for their existence are desperately seeking revenue. Either Burns is very naive or a very sophisticated propagandist for the "new" economy world order.

Meanwhile, others who are fully aware of what has been happening have put aside the diplomatic language and are busy pointing fingers at everyone else except themselves. Naturally, capitalism or the greed it inspires is not mentioned. Rather, it's those on the "outside" who are responsible.

Generally, the outsider most often used as a scapegoat when times are hard is the government, and with the demise of the "new" economy this is no exception. Last year, when it became apparent that European telecom operators were paying too much for G3 licenses, many ended up not criticising the telecos for being so stupid, shortsighted, or unprepared, but ended up viewing government as the "robber barons" of the digital age for holding the auctions in the first place.3

In addition to government, blame has also been placed on the shoulders of "technologists and geeks". In an article entitled The Bandwidth Dilemma, media theorist Geert Lovink describes how Charles Leadbeater, author of "Living on Thin Air: The New Economy", not only shifts blame from those clearly responsible for the demise of the "new" economy, but simply ignores some of the fundamental facts behind the development of the Internet. In conjunction with this, Lovink shows how the likes of Leadbeater are not only mistaken about the past, but are just as ignorant of the present as well.

The history of the commercial exploitation of the Internet is one of excess, pure and simple. Take for instance, the proliferation of pop-up window advertisements. Advertisers have undertaken the tactics that were once seen as nasty methods used only by porn and spam sites. What is more, this is only the beginning or, as Joe Burns warns, "the tip of the advertiser revolution that's about to hit."

This is because simply viewing banners ads is not enough for advertisers any more. Advertisers are using new methods in order to force you to look at their ads in the hope that it would increase traffic and, ultimately, sales. In-your-face tactics, such as pop-up windows, are thus seen as the latest means to achieve this end.

What these commercial exploiters of the public media don't realise is that it's only a matter of time until the web becomes nothing more than a blur of windows, as everyone will end up using the same aggressive tactic. Eventually no one will stand out anymore and software utilities will be used to overcome the inconvenience. Thus, in order to take the initiative in the attention economy, someone will then raise the stakes and do something even more aggressive.

In fact, this process has already become a dire reality. According to a report in CNet News, some programs now alter a user's browser when installed, changing the user's HOME setting and disabling the BACK button. There is also the use of what has come to be known as "Active Advertising", or what some refer to as "takeover" and "roadblock" ads. Unlike pop-up ads, you have no control over them.4

Added to all this is the prevalence of what is known as spyware, in where secretly installed files on a user's computer creates a profile for targeted advertising (cf. www.lavasoft.de). Meanwhile, pop-up ads have become more noticeable and more annoying. According to recent statistics, users are far more likely to notice pop-up ads than banners, but are even more likely to be annoyed by them.

If anyone is to blame for the demise of the "new" economy, it's such advertising practices which have spiralled out of control. Because users don't click on banner ads in large enough numbers, at least to the satisfaction of advertisers, the latter have become more and more aggressive in order to force users to look at the ads. Users, however, continue to resist, which then lead advertisers to explore new ways to become even more aggressive, at which point there really isn't much more aggression to be implemented and advertisers don't see it worth their time and money anymore. By this time, however, the web will most likely be a wasteland of digital content resembling television. As for the New Economy (version 2), it will also lay in ruins. No doubt, there will be another Charles Leadbeater then to lay the blame on web designers and programmers.

While the likes of Leadbeater and his theories will indubitably end up on the trash heap of history, along with the digerati before him (e.g., John Perry Barlow and others who advocated such nonsense as the California Ideology and the Long Boom), the problem they pose is with the influence they peddle. In Leadbeater's case, not only does he have influence through his contacts in the business world, but his perverted philosophy is featured in well-known publications like The New Statesman. Presently, he is also an advisor in e-commerce matters for New Labour in the UK.

Whether blame for the decline of the "new" economy lies with governments, geeks, or both, there is a basic feeling among so-called "net entrepreneurs" that they need to "take back the Net", that is, as if it was theirs in the first place. Such a call to action was explicitly made by Michael H. Tchong, Editor and CEO of Iconocast. In order to help the "Net regain its respect" he called on users to "band together and send the world a loud, clear message that the Net will not only survive, but thrive." To do this, a "Take Back the Net" day was organised for April 3rd in where consumers should avoid off-line retail stores and make at least one purchase at an on-line one.

This pathetic appeal tried to put on a philanthropic face by encouraging users to also "donate" to a favorite charity, that is, those listed on a site called iGive.com. While it's easy to ignore such ridiculous nonsense by not paying attention, the fact of the matter is it heralds yet another unfortunate and unwelcome development in the evolution of computer-mediated communications: on-line begging.

In order to keep sites "free", some sites have resorted to asking users directly for money. In other words, panhandling has now come to the Internet. The process is euphemistically called The Honor System and was first set up by Amazon.com in order to either "sell digital content" or to "collect voluntary payments" as low as one dollar.

As with many innovations used over the Internet, the Honor System is something which looks good in theory but in practice will turn out to be a nuisance. In theory, it's a useful concept for non-profits, charities and others who don't regard themselves as an "e-business" and don't want to "sell" content per se, but would like to give the opportunity for others to contribute financially, if they so feel inclined.

The problem is that it's not going to turn out this way. In fact, it's going to open a pandora's box of abuse which will make spam feel like a minor inconvenience. Like those who once believed that clicking on banner ads could eventually make them rich, many will look to the Honor System as a way of making quick and easy money. Consequently, many sites will proclaim to provide content and then either send you something that was free anyway or not send anything at all. In addition to this, in order to increase exposure, it's likely that some will resort to pop-up pages to pester you for a donation until you actually donate something. As one commentator predicted, "surfing the Web might start to feel like a walk around lower Manhattan."

To make matters worse, it's not something limited to web design but is in the mindset of communications technology development in general. Take for example the GPS-style information and distributed communications systems which are being designed primarily for mobile commerce. As Bill Spornitz noted on Nettime5, "systems that exploit the ability to detect someone's proximity in order to sell them something aren't going to stand the test of time - sounds more like electronic panhandling to me."

Unfortunately, the obsession over creating purely commercial applications -- and "killer" ones at that -- coupled with the doom and gloom over the "new" recession, is putting out of focus the true nature of the Internet and technological development. The commercialised nature of the Internet was, for the most part, a late-comer and not a universally welcomed sight amongst many users. In fact, the Internet was very much alive and well before the appearance of e-commerce, and it continues to grow unabated in the aftermath of the dot-com shakeout.

The Quiet Revolution

Despite the media obsession with what is commonly dubbed the "tech wreck", not everything is as bad as corporate spin makes them out to be. For instance, Gordon Cook of the COOK Report, like many others, finds that the Internet revolution is not spelled dot-com. "The revolution is in fact to be found in a total revamping of the transport of bits," he writes. "While the dot com empires of 1999 collapsed in 2000 the cost effectiveness of pushing the Internet Protocol over glass yielded more dividends than ever before."

This can be seen in the new technological developments underway, ones which are bringing networks with access capacities in the range of 10-100 Gigabits per second within the reach of the research community. This will certainly leads to completely new models for networking infrastructures and provides the possibility of a more stable environment for old applications such as streaming media, and the realisation of new ones like virtual presence.

There are many novel techniques for faster optical communications, most of them concentrating on the efficient use of optical fibres. Optical fibres are glass pipes surrounded by another glassy material called cladding with a total diameter less than that of the human hair. They act as wave guides through which light can be transmitted with very little leakage through the sidewalls. Information is transmitted along these glass pipes in the form of coded pulses or fragmented images.

One recent development in this area allows a fibre-optic communication systems to function without depending on the polarisation state of the transmitted light.6 Wave-guided devices, the basis of fibre-optic communication systems, experience a lot of limitations due to their dependence on the polarisation state of the transmitted wave. A new technique, however, allows the polarisation independent functioning of optical devices. This technique is based on Lithium Niobate (LiNbO3) technology, and enables optical switching at desired nodes of a fibre network.

Optical switching is one of the key areas in networking technology being targeted by research. Up to now, switching is accomplished by converting the optical signal to an electrical one and vice-versa. This detour slows traffic considerably in today's fibre-optic networks. However, by having communication between two points take place using a single optical link and a single laser source, speed is greatly increased. Hence, work is now progressing towards an all-optical transparent network.

In conjunction with optical switching, much has also been done to increase the speed of communication through the generation of ultrafast pulses. In principle, sending a message down an optical fibre can be thought of as one flash for yes, two flashes for no. By making these flashes extremely short, higher speeds of communication can be achieved.

A new technique for generating such ultrafast pulses has already been developed in Europe. 7 A semiconductor laser designed by a Danish laboratory (based on a theoretical study at the Lebedev Physics Institute in Russia) is able to produce one such pulse approximately every 1E-10 of a second (i.e., at a repetition rate of exactly 9.5 GHz).

Optical networking provides network capacities beyond what was once believed possible only a few years ago, and the latest research developments seem to indicate that Terabit networks will become available in the not too distant future. "The explosion of bandwidth as the result of more fiber and technology that squeezes more bandwidth from each strand has meant that, in some instances, the delivery of a gigabit costs about what a T-1 did a decade ago," explains Cook. New networking technology is thus being developed and deployed in order to benefit fully from the available infrastructure and to enable increasingly demanding applications.

For individual users, this is a significant development. Basically, advances in networking technology is estimated to be upwards of one thousand times cheaper than that which powers a circuit switched voice call. At this rate, Cook and others predict that the telecoms will no longer be needed. With falling costs and the amount of capital necessary to become a small-scale telecommunications provider rapidly shrinking, "independent back yard gigabit Ethernet providers can deliver broadband services at a fraction of the cost but equal in quality to what is accessible from larger more traditional companies," forecasts Cook.

If this is so, then "new" economy pundits may be in much deeper trouble than they think. We may not only be witnessing a "new" recession, but it could very well lead to a "new" depression, that is, if Cook is correct that we are standing on the cusp of events that may overturn the economic structure of the first five years of the commercial Internet.

Aside from advanced networks and networking technologies, progress has been made in other areas as well, such as middleware and security. While dot-coms peaked and crashed, the last two years have seen a rapid development in the "core middleware" area, where the combination of directory and security techniques offer the opportunity to manage networks and services in a more reliable way.

The development of intelligent software to facilitate the use of information systems, such as in the case of electronic brokerage, is a good example. Such software not only discovers information, goods and services, but also locates suppliers, negotiates on issues regarding quality, delivery and price, delivers in the digital domain, and manages payment.

Much has also been done in the area of data protection. According to one company, it has developed a programme specialising in the design of protection procedures for any binary data system.8 The procedure, known as Digiprotect, supposedly protects against the piracy of audio-CDs and CD-ROMs on all computer systems and CD etchings. A tag is included in each manufactured CD (CD-audio or CD-ROM) that is specific to each client. The software, which runs in an autonomous manner in the background, is able to prevent the creation of patches and, in turn, makes it impossible to duplicate any CD, be it audio or software. If the technology is as foolproof as it is claimed, it might spell trouble for dealers in illicit software and music.

Aside from all this, perhaps the biggest project of the past few years is the development of grid computing. "The Grid" is generally regarded as "the next generation Internet".9 Researchers working on the Grid hope to produce a system which is able to cope better with the increasing flow of information. This high speed network would link people with collaborative tools and supercomputers, processor farms, disks, major databases and informatics. Application grids, such as the ones currently being planned or deployed in high-energy physics, astronomy, seismology and environmental research, opens the way to scientific and educational methods based on far more distributed data collection and much more tightly coupled collaboration between researchers and teachers.

Grid computing is a concept introduced only a few years ago. The "always available" nature of high-speed networking will permit this framework to greatly extend the influence of "industrial-strength" distributed systems. It will allow research communities to improve peer-to-peer and group interaction dramatically, and to share computational and data resources far more effectively than in the past.

At last year's Lisbon summit, European leaders agreed to launch the DataGrid initiative with the objective of developing a dedicated network for European science applications research. The Grid is set to receive 9.8 million Euros from the European Commission's Fifth RTD Framework programme (FP5). These funds will come from the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme of FP5.10

The ultimate objective of the EU is to develop and demonstrate an informatic architecture distributed throughout Europe by high-rate data transmission links. "This project is seen by international computing experts and EU authorities as an ideal test case for the development of a new model of world-wide distributed computing and the natural evolution of the world wide web," adds the Swiss-based European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is the project leader and counting on using the DataGrid in the near future.

A Fork in the Road

It has become clear that some technological developments hold promise for the future. The Web is a perfect case in point. Originally conceived by scientists in the 1980s and subsequently appropriated and globalised for very different purposes, it has now become a somewhat obsolete tool for researchers. Particle physics, biology and the earth sciences, for example, require simultaneous on-line access to -- and intensive computation and analysis of -- shared large-scale databases across widely distributed scientific communities all over the world.

Unfortunately, commercialisation has often led to "innovation" which is nothing more than a simple rehash of existing technology -- taking something old and making it look as if it is something new. This approach is the stagnant legacy of e-commerce and a commercialised Internet. It's anything but innovative and is most likely to stifle technological progress than encourage it. Gordon Cook perhaps sums up best the difficulties which lie ahead:

"There appears to be a choice of two paths to our telecom future. One is to go with the highly innovative pure Internet approach of gigabit Ethernet over condominium fiber. Such a choice empowers the customer, facilitates decentralization over centralized control and provides small and innovative businesses with the environment that they need in order to flourish. The other path is to try to fore stall the innovation by squashing competitors with a massive vertically integrated company founded on older technology and leveraging access to content and over a network monopoly so pervasive that people will find they have no choice but to buy it."