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Internet Architecture and Innovation |  | Author: Barbara van Schewick
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 48924
Media: Hardcover
Edition: New
Pages: 560
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Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0262013975
Dewey Decimal Number: 004.65
EAN: 9780262013970
ASIN: 0262013975
Publication Date: July 30, 2010
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Product Description
The Internet's remarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. New applications continually enable new ways of using the Internet, and new physical networking technologies increase the range of networks over which the Internet can run. Questions about the relationship between innovation and the Internet's architecture have shaped the debates over open access to broadband networks, network neutrality, nondiscriminatory network management, and future Internet architecture. In Internet Architecture and Innovation, Barbara van Schewick explores the economic consequences of Internet architecture, offering a detailed analysis of how it affects the economic environment for innovation.
Van Schewick describes the design principles on which the Internet's original architecture was based—modularity, layering, and the end-to-end arguments—and shows how they shaped the original architecture. She analyzes in detail how the original architecture affected innovation—in particular, the development of new applications—and how changing the architecture would affect this kind of innovation.
Van Schewick concludes that the original architecture of the Internet fostered application innovation. Current changes that deviate from the Internet's original design principles reduce the amount and quality of application innovation, limit users' ability to use the Internet as they see fit, and threaten the Internet's ability to realize its economic, social, cultural, and political potential. If left to themselves, network providers will continue to change the internal structure of the Internet in ways that are good for them but not necessarily for the rest of us. Government intervention may be needed to save the social benefits associated with the Internet's original design principles.
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| Customer Reviews:
 One of the most important books in tech policy in a decade August 13, 2010
Marvin Ammori
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is an important and brilliant book, which I consider required reading for anyone interested in or serious about the Internet or innovation.
I have written a review of this book on my blog ([...]) and on the Huffington Post.
As I say there, this book is one of the very few books in the field of Internet policy that is in the same league as Larry Lessig's Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0, in 2000, and Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, in 2006, in terms of its originality, depth, and importance to Internet policy and other disciplines. I expect the book to affect how people think about the Internet; about the interactions between law and technical architectures in all areas of law; about entrepreneurship in general. I also think her insights on innovation economics, which strike me as far more persuasive than lawyers' usual assumptions, should influence "law and economics" thinking for the better.
Books this good don't come along every day--or even every year-and I'm already late to the praise-party. Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig (the trail-blazing cyberlaw champion) recommended it in the New York Times this week; Susan Crawford (a law professor who served as a top White House advisor) recommended it in an op-ed in Salon/GigaOm yesterday; Brad Burnham, the venture capitalist who was featured earlier this week in the NYT's Room for Debate, also posted an endorsing review on his blog. MIT engineering professor David Reed (one of the key architects of the IP protocol, inventor of the UDP protocol) praises it on the book jacket.
It is not easy material--the Internet's technologies and how innovation actually evolves--but she writes for a general audience, not a technologist or lawyer, and you will learn a lot from, and be challenged by, the ideas in this book.
 Tedious and Superficial August 17, 2010
R. Bennett (Portland, OR USA)
4 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is a crime against the environment. The author's point - that the Internet was designed with a high degree of generality in order to make it easy to bolt new things on it - could have been made more cogently in a blog post. Most of the book is self-referential guides to its convoluted organization or restatements of points that have already been made or which will be made. There's just not that much material there, although there are a lot of footnotes. Reading this book electronically would be a lot easier than reading the paper copy, as you have to do so much flipping to the footnotes; unfortunately, there's no Kindle version available. I guess that's too high tech for the MIT Press.
"Internet Architecture and Innovation" demonstrates the value of a good editor. The author is incredibly long-winded, and the book would have benefited from radical use of the red pencil. You'll skip around a great deal in this book, but that's OK, there are a very small number of points and they're all expressed a couple dozen times or more.
The principal problem with the book is the author's lack of understanding of the engineering process. Engineers, unlike law professors writing books about engineering, don't work from first principles like the Internet's retrospective end-to-end arguments principle; they make tradeoffs and design toward a goal or set of goals. Thus, when the Internet was built the project manager, Bob Kahn, adapted a design that had already been proved in the French research network CYCLADES rather than starting with a blank slate. CYCLADES designer Louis Pouzin went with an "architecture" that was appropriate for a research network, and not very suitable for an everyday network for unskilled people. The Internet has proved difficult to manage and expensive to operate because this research-centric design is still there. Security, privacy, viruses, spam, and denial of service attacks raise the price and lower the utility of the Internet, all a direct consequence of its organization.
The author is right that the Internet's organization makes it easy for some application programmers to bring new information services on-line, but wrong about the scope of the innovations it permits. Regardless of the system architecture, the services offered by a network constrain application developers. The telephone network was innovation-limiting because it's a slow, narrow-band system, not because it lacks end-to-end architecture.
Because the Internet offers poor support for performance-intensive real-time applications (gaming, video conferencing, other forms of communication-oriented rather than content-oriented apps) the designers of these applications pay an innovation tax in the form of extra effort that effectively subsidizes content-oriented applications. They also end up bypassing most of the Internet through Content Delivery Networks and managed services. So the author is wrong regarding her claim that the Internet is the best of all possible networks from the innovator's perspective; it's good for some applications, but not for others.
If you must read this book for your job or a school assignment, wait for the Kindle version if you can (MIT Press says it will be three years from now;) it's just too tedious on paper.
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