How Will the Internet Look in 20 Years?

Much of the public policy discussion in Internet circles in recent months – including the Global INET conference in Geneva last month celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Internet Society - has been on the topic of Internet governance: how to steer the Internet to balance the diverse objectives of its numerous stakeholders.

The debates around control versus creativity, voluntary versus mandatory, centralized versus distributed, have counterparts in other dialogues on how society should share and sustain vital resources. Humans have been forming and reforming structures for balancing stakeholders’ interests in the world’s often limited resources for millennia.

But the Internet is different than nearly every other resource, natural or constructed, that humans have aspired to govern in two fundamental ways. First, it encompasses vast computational capabilities, even an emergent form of distributed intelligence. Second, those capabilities are not only renewable, but they are expanding at a dramatic pace.

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Innovating in India – The Jugaad Principle

Last week I made my third trip to India and my first one with Verisign, visiting the company’s development center in Bangalore.

Paul Tidwell, who leads Verisign Labs’ program office, also joined me for the trip.

We had three full days of meetings with the center’s director Prashanth Honnavalli, his management team and staff on technology and innovation to learn about the many new ideas that our colleagues in Bangalore are pursuing as part of the company’s Registry and Network Intelligence and Availability businesses. We also shared thoughts on Verisign’s long-term technology direction.

One of the new things I learned from our colleagues in India is the principle of Jugaad, a Hindi term that means clever and resourceful. It describes the process of innovating by doing whatever it takes to get something working with minimal resources, often by using work-arounds.

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