Taming the Wild, Wild Web

Bud Michels has given up on the Internet.

“We don’t have any control over the Internet,” said Michels, president and chief executive of Maryland-based CSP Inc., which helps big clients protect priceless corporate data in the event of an earthquake, computer network outage or other disaster. “If something goes down, you don’t even know who’s accountable. The Internet is, like, ‘Who ya gonna call?’ ”

That’s an example of how the Internet’s leading virtue, its unruliness, is increasingly getting cursed by business executives and economists as its worst flaw. After years of fruitless efforts to make money selling goods and services over the Web, many entrepreneurs and other businesspeople are starting to blame the system’s fundamental design for their failures.

Businesses are growing so frustrated by the unreliability of the public Internet--the network most commonly used for Web surfing, e-mail and other familiar functions--that many have moved their most critical applications to alternative semiprivate networks.

That’s an expensive option, however, so some big corporations think the answer is to change the Internet’s basic wiring. By adding “intelligent” switches and other devices, they believe, the system could work faster, avoid traffic jams, distinguish between high-priority data and other material that can wait, and generally live up to its promise as a worldwide communications and entertainment medium.

But doing so almost inevitably means bringing more of the network under commercial control. For consumers, the change might mean faster downloads of video clips and Webcasts. But it also might mean a raft of fees for special services and the appearance of “gatekeepers” with the power to keep certain Web sites or content from appearing on home computers, just as cable systems control which channels can be shown on their subscribers’ TVs and at what price.

The business world’s discontent has increased as the Internet economy has unraveled over the last year. That’s not surprising, given that the network was first mapped out more than 30 years ago, when it was devised as a coast-to-coast system connecting universities working on projects financed by government grants.

“The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn’t excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws,” said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. “The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn’t have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network.”

Others detect a hidden agenda: an attempt by big business to stifle some of the cultural empowerment that the Internet represents.

“This is the past trying to kill the future at a time when the future is down,” said John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a defender of free speech online. “And it’s happening in ways that are generally invisible to the public.”

At the heart of the debate lies decades of history. Before the Internet, the model of a communications network was the one that belonged to AT&T;, this country’s undisputed telecom monopoly until its dismemberment by court order in 1984.

AT&T; had built a “smart” network connecting millions of dumb devices: telephones. Services such as call waiting or teleconferencing were operated by intelligent switches embedded in AT&T;’s circuits, rather than in the phones.

Founders Purposely Built a ‘Dumb’ Internet

This centralized architecture had its advantages, not the least of which was its vaunted 99.999% reliability--the “five nines” standard that may have been Ma Bell’s crowning technical achievement.

But it also reinforced the AT&T; monopoly. As undisputed owner of the phone network, the company dictated how it could be used by customers, who were forbidden to connect any phone to its lines except those that AT&T; manufactured and sold. The phone company decided when and how to roll out new services and how much to charge. Innovative features had to pass muster with AT&T;’s engineers, who often rejected those they thought would encourage competition. Among the rejects: the Arpanet, the government-funded network that evolved into the Internet, which AT&T; obstructed for years.

Mindful of these consequences of a centralized intelligent network, the founding architects of the Internet built its antithesis.

Rather than a smart network, the Internet is dumb, essentially a neutral pipeline ferrying digital bits from one end to another--say, between a computer and Amazon.com’s Web site. By design it is blind to the nature of information it carries, be it a digital copy of a song, a calendar holding someone’s daily meeting schedule or a 3-D computer game. But it can service a limitless variety of smart devices: PCs, hand-held computers, Internet-enabled TVs, Web cams and more. Almost any invention can be attached to the network as long as its output is digital.

Meanwhile, because the Internet is not owned by a single entity, its quality of service is left up to thousands of firms ranging from telecommunications giants such as WorldCom Inc. and Sprint Corp., which operate the backbone--the cross-country data highway--to neighborhood Internet service providers that may be run by high school kids with a high-powered server computer and a leased phone line.

A packet of data is likely to traverse several of these segments. If traffic backs up at the transfer points, the system either slows down or randomly jettisons packets of bits to clear the jam.

If these bits are part of a Web page or an e-mail message, they can be easily re-sent. If they are part of a more complicated application, such as an Internet telephone call, the conversation will be reduced to gibberish.

These factors also weigh on the Internet’s ability to deliver speed and capacity, which is why during heavily promoted Webcasts most potential viewers get shut out.

“With bits on a dumb pipe, I can’t do a major Webcast event,” said Milo Medin, co-founder and chief technical officer of At Home Corp.’s Excite@Home, the leading provider of broadband Internet access over cable lines.

Yet, precisely because it is configured as a huge web of interconnecting pipelines, the Internet is almost universally accessible and resistant to local damage, political censorship or the designs of corporate landlords. In just over three decades, it has grown to serve more than 400 million users worldwide.

“Thanks to people who had the foresight to keep the middle stupid, we’ve been able to discover new, totally unanticipated applications like e-mail,” David Isenberg, a telecommunications expert and former AT&T; Laboratories network engineer, said at a recent conference at Stanford Law School.

Explosively popular applications such as the instant messaging system ICQ and the music file-sharing service Napster were developed privately by amateurs and allowed to find their own audiences on the vast World Wide Web.

Many communications executives complain, however, that as the Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous public utility, its shortcomings in service quality and reliability have lost their charm, which is evident to anyone who has waited a seeming eternity for a Web page to load or suffered through a weeklong outage in an e-mail account.

All that could be addressed by changes that would make the Internet faster, more reliable and more profitable for some companies. But they also would make it less universally accessible and more resistant to innovations that do not conform to new standards.

Whether the open model and the business model can comfortably coexist is debatable. As with any culture war, a wide spectrum of opinion lies between the two extremes.

Traditionalists Versus Business

At one end are Internet aficionados convinced that the network’s historic openness is threatened as surely as the habitat of an endangered species is by the encroachment of land developers. They argue that the Internet is essentially a social phenomenon, the value of which lies in fostering free speech and breaking the historic stranglehold that telephone companies and other media companies have had on public communication.

“Some of these people, though not all, are a category of folks who never left the ‘60s,” said John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board, which oversees the network’s structure.

Klensin is equally critical of executives irked by the difficulty of making money from the Internet the old-fashioned way by controlling the customer’s access to scarce resources and services. These people, Klensin contends, need to look harder for novel ways to exploit the new medium.

“We haven’t fully explored the range of business models and opportunities here,” he said. “That process will be significantly other than painless.”

But instead of contriving new businesses that make do with the Internet as it is, many new business plans involve tampering with the network’s electronic innards. Some of these changes would permanently alter the way people use the Web by allowing private companies to set themselves up as gatekeepers to the Internet, charging users for new features and services or for those that have been customarily free.

For example, Excite@Home has made numerous deals allowing information and entertainment content from such providers as Fox News, Bloomberg and cable channel Comedy Central to be transmitted to @Home subscribers at especially high speed. This is done by placing the premium material on @Home’s computers--which have relatively direct connections to subscribers’ homes--so the material does not have to traverse the clog-prone public Internet to reach subscribers.

Critics say that system in effect allows Excite@Home to control what content reaches its subscribers, a perversion of the Internet’s democratic principles.

The Internet service provider, however, argues that its subscribers remain free to surf the rest of the Web without interference, and that @Home is merely improving access to material that might prove especially popular.

“By [the critics’] logic,” Medin said, “I can’t make one thing better without making everything else worse. The fact is, I’m creating added capability on my part of the Net.” Giving Walt Disney Co. material preferential treatment, for example, would not mean @Home would block its users’ access to Disney rivals, he said.

“If I were to block all access to Time Warner, that would be a different story. But if we did, our subscribers would scream bloody murder,” he said.

Telecom executives say that without a major redesign of the Internet, such eagerly anticipated applications as video-on-demand, Internet telephony and Webcasts of live entertainment events will never be economical.

“The potential of many new technologies has not been realized because the Internet hasn’t delivered the necessary performance,” said Greg Davis, vice president for marketing and product management at Core Express, a company that leases fiber-optic lines to provide high-quality Internet service to business clients. “A lot of opportunities have been left on the table.”

Others say that the Internet’s architecture can be improved without destroying its traditional values, and that some upgrading is essential to improve the network’s fit with the demands of modern media and commerce.

Companies Are Having to Pay for Reliability

The changes Nolle envisions would give more users better service at a reasonable cost, he said. Today, businesses needing absolutely reliable service must bypass much of the Internet by routing digital traffic over their own private lines, a solution that can cost $500,000 or more a month. Others buy hybrid services from such companies as Michels’ CSP, to which customers pay varying rates depending on the grade of reliability they need.

“We use the Internet today only for customers who don’t need up-to-the-second data recovery,” Michels said. These are clients who can survive a temporary network glitch that sends their transmissions on an error-prone cross-country detour. “If something happens [to the network] in Philly and all of a sudden you’re being routed through Kansas City, that’s a huge number of hops” during which data may be lost.

Many network experts believe that the Internet will have to change to accommodate enhanced services such as @Home’s. The question is whether this means the traditional network will become a victim of its own success.

“The existing open Net is so firmly implanted in education and research that it will continue there as an open Net indefinitely,” said Michael Roberts, former chairman of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, a public body that oversees the distribution of Internet addresses. But he added, “It’s too big, too important, too political to be treated as something for only a band of talented engineers to preside over.”

But any changes in the network’s basic structure will face numerous obstacles, including resistance from traditionalists who believe that the Internet is popular precisely because it cannot be controlled by big companies.

“The [Internet] is in trouble because it threatens so much of the establishment that it’s provoked a backlash,” Isenberg said.