Events
Seminar @ Cornell Tech: David Clark
Eleven Forces Shaping the Future of the Internet
When I started working on the Internet in 1975, the technologists were shaping the future. No more. When the Internet became a commercial offering in the mid-1990s, investment decisions and economics became the driver that shaped the future. Today we see a confluence of forces—some arising from the intrinsic character of network industries, some arising from the global character of the Internet, and some from commercial incentives—that are leading us to a next major transition in the forces shaping the future—a transition as dramatic as the transition to the commercial world of the 1990s.
Speaker Bio
David Clark is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is technical director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative. Since the mid-70s, he has been leading the development of the Internet; from 1981-1989 he acted as Chief Protocol Architect in this development, and chaired the Internet Activities Board. His current research looks at re-definition of the architectural underpinnings of the Internet, Internet security, and the relation of technology and architecture to economic, societal and policy considerations. He is past chairman of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies, and has contributed to a number of studies on the societal and policy impact of computer communications. His recent book, designing an Internet, describes the design decisions that shaped the Internet, and how it might have come out differently.