Bud Michels has given up on the Internet.
"We don't have any control over the Internet," said Michels, president and chief executive of Maryland-based CSP Inc., which helps big clients protect priceless corporate data in the event of an earthquake, computer network outage or other disaster. "If something goes down, you don't even know who's accountable. The Internet is, like, 'Who ya gonna call?' "
That's an example of how the Internet's leading virtue, its unruliness, is increasingly getting cursed by business executives and economists as its worst flaw. After years of fruitless efforts to make money selling goods and services over the Web, many entrepreneurs and other businesspeople are starting to blame the system's fundamental design for their failures.
Businesses are growing so frustrated by the unreliability of the public Internet--the network most commonly used for Web surfing, e-mail and other familiar functions--that many have moved their most critical applications to alternative semiprivate networks.
That's an expensive option, however, so some big corporations think the answer is to change the Internet's basic wiring. By adding "intelligent" switches and other devices, they believe, the system could work faster, avoid traffic jams, distinguish between high-priority data and other material that can wait, and generally live up to its promise as a worldwide communications and entertainment medium.
But doing so almost inevitably means bringing more of the network under commercial control. For consumers, the change might mean faster downloads of video clips and Webcasts. But it also might mean a raft of fees for special services and the appearance of "gatekeepers" with the power to keep certain Web sites or content from appearing on home computers, just as cable systems control which channels can be shown on their subscribers' TVs and at what price.
The business world's discontent has increased as the Internet economy has unraveled over the last year. That's not surprising, given that the network was first mapped out more than 30 years ago, when it was devised as a coast-to-coast system connecting universities working on projects financed by government grants.
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
Others detect a hidden agenda: an attempt by big business to stifle some of the cultural empowerment that the Internet represents.
"This is the past trying to kill the future at a time when the future is down," said John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a defender of free speech online. "And it's happening in ways that are generally invisible to the public."
At the heart of the debate lies decades of history. Before the Internet, the model of a communications network was the one that belonged to AT&T, this country's undisputed telecom monopoly until its dismemberment by court order in 1984.
AT&T had built a "smart" network connecting millions of dumb devices: telephones. Services such as call waiting or teleconferencing were operated by intelligent switches embedded in AT&T's circuits, rather than in the phones.
Founders Purposely Built a 'Dumb' Internet
This centralized architecture had its advantages, not the least of which was its vaunted 99.999% reliability--the "five nines" standard that may have been Ma Bell's crowning technical achievement.
But it also reinforced the AT&T monopoly. As undisputed owner of the phone network, the company dictated how it could be used by customers, who were forbidden to connect any phone to its lines except those that AT&T manufactured and sold. The phone company decided when and how to roll out new services and how much to charge. Innovative features had to pass muster with AT&T's engineers, who often rejected those they thought would encourage competition. Among the rejects: the Arpanet, the government-funded network that evolved into the Internet, which AT&T obstructed for years.
Mindful of these consequences of a centralized intelligent network, the founding architects of the Internet built its antithesis.
Rather than a smart network, the Internet is dumb, essentially a neutral pipeline ferrying digital bits from one end to another--say, between a computer and Amazon.com's Web site. By design it is blind to the nature of information it carries, be it a digital copy of a song, a calendar holding someone's daily meeting schedule or a 3-D computer game. But it can service a limitless variety of smart devices: PCs, hand-held computers, Internet-enabled TVs, Web cams and more. Almost any invention can be attached to the network as long as its output is digital.
