The Internet鈥檚 Coming of Age by the Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board, National Research Council/National Academy Press,
拢17.95/$34.95, ISBN 0309069920
HOW is the Internet coming along? This is the question that The
Internet鈥檚 Coming of Age asks鈥攁nd answers. It鈥檚 the fourth report in
a series from the National Research Council examining technical challenges and
public policy issues.
It鈥檚 also an interesting measure of how much the Net has been commercialised.
Most of the committee members work for large companies. Microsoft, Cisco,
Citibank and AT&T are all represented on the not-too-snappily named
Committee on the Internet in the Evolving Information Infrastructure. But the
book is a fair summary of how things stand rather than some sort of manifesto
for corporate takeover.
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You鈥檒l find interestingly abstruse stuff here: the difficulties of rolling
out the next generation of Internet protocols, IPv6, to replace our 20-year-old
system and give us more Net addresses as well as bang up-to-date debates about
open access and scalability.
Public-policy issues include hot topics such as privacy, anonymity and
authentication. These are the kinds of things that are heatedly debated at the
annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, and elsewhere. Here all that
fury is boiled down to pretty dry stuff. But it is a useful and more or less
current overview, something that鈥檚 difficult to get in print.
Of course, the truly dedicated nerd will enjoy reading the source materials
and documentation on the Net itself.