The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Internet Society Supports, Manages Ever-Growing Network
Q & A: Anthony Rutkowski
Title: Internet Society executive director.
Age: 51.
Favorite Web Sites: Louvre, Fractal Art Museum at the University of Rennes, various “STAR Trek” sites.
Internet address: amraisoc.org.
In a rapidly expanding electronic universe, owned by no one and controlled by many, the Internet Society was established three years ago by a group of people who had a common interest in making sure the center would somehow hold.
With an annual budget of about $1 million, Anthony Rutkowski, the group’s first full-time, salaried director, has been trying for the last year to carry out that mission.
Rutkowski, a lawyer-engineer with a social conscience who once got elected to the City Council in Cape Canaveral, Fla., has worked for the Federal Communications Commission in Washington and the International Telecom Union in Geneva.
These days, he can usually be found at Isoc’s physical office in Reston, Va., or at the organization’s virtual headquarters on the Internet--https://www.isoc.org. We tracked him down at the first Internet Society Summit, held last week in San Diego.
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Q. What’s the hardest part of your job?
A. Well, the Internet can best be described as a network where everyone gains by cooperation but still likes to maintain a substantial amount of autonomy. There is quite a bit of competition between all the network service providers. So trying to effect cooperation and coordination can be difficult.
But that’s why Isoc was founded. It had become apparent that the Internet was becoming very global, very large, significantly more commercial and business-oriented, all of which implied that there would be necessary transitions in the funding and support of the administrative infrastructure.
Up to that point and still to some extent today, a lot of the underlying administrative activity that allows the Internet to function has been paid for either by government resources in the United States and abroad--and has relied upon a lot of volunteer time. As it gets larger and more commercial, that’s just not going to be a sustainable kind of model.
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Q. How fast is the Internet growing?
A. The best measure is by the number of host computers on the network, which has gone up by more than 100% over the last year. As of the end of January, there were 4.8 million hosts, and if you do the mathematics it suggests something on the order of 10,000 hosts per day are being added.
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Q. How many users per host?
A. That’s much harder to measure. A host could be a PC on somebody’s desk, or a workstation used by dozens of people, or a gateway to an on-line service like CompuServe. The best we can do is say the number of people using the Internet is likely between 20 million to 40 million.
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Q. How is the character of the network changing as it grows?
A. It’s becoming more global. The growth outside the United States over the last year has been 1% per month greater than inside the United States. Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific show particularly dramatic growth rates. There’s about 230 official countries and territories of the world, and of those, nearly 200 have network information centers now. And there is a lot of activity in places like Eastern Africa and other developing countries.
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Q. Don’t developing countries have more pressing concerns than getting on the Internet?
A. It’s probably more relevant in developing nations than it is to a developed environment. It’s relevant both to poor countries as well as remote countries. One of the countries that has seen the most Internet activity is Australia, simply because it is remote and many businesses and professionals find the Internet enables them to be remote and be part of the world at the same time.
For poor countries, it allows them access to all kinds of resources--not only information but people. One of the longtime problems faced by so many developing countries is captured under the term brain drain , where the best and the brightest people went outside the country to be educated and never came back. This allows them in fact to return and to very much be a part of their professional environment.
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Q. A large proportion of Internet traffic has always traveled over the backbone supported by the National Science Foundation. But the NSF is pulling the plug at the end of this month. How will that affect the network?
A. The NSF has been phasing out since November, so we don’t expect any kind of disruption. What it will do is give an enormous boost to unrestricted use of the Internet. The withdrawal of government funding is one of the things that’s allowed widespread commercial use of the network and really driven down the price of access.
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Q. What are the biggest growing pains the network faces over the next year?
A. The first is dealing with the administrative infrastructure. In the United States alone, 700 domain names a day are being registered. That process is funded by the U.S. government, but that is about to change. So sustaining the capability to deal with that increased activity is pretty significant.
The other is a subtle one: to get rid of export restrictions on cryptography. That’s key to having a more secure Internet and having a variety of applications that will support innovative uses of the Internet that range from things like cybercash to copyright protection.
