The Coming of Internet 2: Can Higher Education Reinvent the Internet?

摘要

Once upon a time, as everyone knows, the Internet was the arena of academic and research institutions. Today it's the arena of everyone, from the kid next door to the largest companies in the world. By any measure you care to use—number of domains, amount of traffic, number of users—the Internet became a phenomenal success once it was brought to the public at large. However, for academia that success has come at a price. Today academic networks compete with all the other traffic on the Internet. Whereas certain critics' response to this problem has been in essence, "Welcome to the real world," several issues belie that opinion. First, the universities and research institutions have come to rely on the Internet as their basic means of communication, much as corporations rely on the telephone or as our grandparents relied on mail.