Meanwhile, because the Internet is not owned by a single entity, its quality of service is left up to thousands of firms ranging from telecommunications giants such as WorldCom Inc. and Sprint Corp., which operate the backbone--the cross-country data highway--to neighborhood Internet service providers that may be run by high school kids with a high-powered server computer and a leased phone line.
A packet of data is likely to traverse several of these segments. If traffic backs up at the transfer points, the system either slows down or randomly jettisons packets of bits to clear the jam.
If these bits are part of a Web page or an e-mail message, they can be easily re-sent. If they are part of a more complicated application, such as an Internet telephone call, the conversation will be reduced to gibberish.
These factors also weigh on the Internet's ability to deliver speed and capacity, which is why during heavily promoted Webcasts most potential viewers get shut out.
"With bits on a dumb pipe, I can't do a major Webcast event," said Milo Medin, co-founder and chief technical officer of At Home Corp.'s Excite@Home, the leading provider of broadband Internet access over cable lines.
Yet, precisely because it is configured as a huge web of interconnecting pipelines, the Internet is almost universally accessible and resistant to local damage, political censorship or the designs of corporate landlords. In just over three decades, it has grown to serve more than 400 million users worldwide.
"Thanks to people who had the foresight to keep the middle stupid, we've been able to discover new, totally unanticipated applications like e-mail," David Isenberg, a telecommunications expert and former AT&T Laboratories network engineer, said at a recent conference at Stanford Law School.
Explosively popular applications such as the instant messaging system ICQ and the music file-sharing service Napster were developed privately by amateurs and allowed to find their own audiences on the vast World Wide Web.
Many communications executives complain, however, that as the Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous public utility, its shortcomings in service quality and reliability have lost their charm, which is evident to anyone who has waited a seeming eternity for a Web page to load or suffered through a weeklong outage in an e-mail account.
All that could be addressed by changes that would make the Internet faster, more reliable and more profitable for some companies. But they also would make it less universally accessible and more resistant to innovations that do not conform to new standards.
Whether the open model and the business model can comfortably coexist is debatable. As with any culture war, a wide spectrum of opinion lies between the two extremes.
Traditionalists Versus Business
At one end are Internet aficionados convinced that the network's historic openness is threatened as surely as the habitat of an endangered species is by the encroachment of land developers. They argue that the Internet is essentially a social phenomenon, the value of which lies in fostering free speech and breaking the historic stranglehold that telephone companies and other media companies have had on public communication.
"Some of these people, though not all, are a category of folks who never left the '60s," said John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board, which oversees the network's structure.
Klensin is equally critical of executives irked by the difficulty of making money from the Internet the old-fashioned way by controlling the customer's access to scarce resources and services. These people, Klensin contends, need to look harder for novel ways to exploit the new medium.
"We haven't fully explored the range of business models and opportunities here," he said. "That process will be significantly other than painless."
But instead of contriving new businesses that make do with the Internet as it is, many new business plans involve tampering with the network's electronic innards. Some of these changes would permanently alter the way people use the Web by allowing private companies to set themselves up as gatekeepers to the Internet, charging users for new features and services or for those that have been customarily free.
For example, Excite@Home has made numerous deals allowing information and entertainment content from such providers as Fox News, Bloomberg and cable channel Comedy Central to be transmitted to @Home subscribers at especially high speed. This is done by placing the premium material on @Home's computers--which have relatively direct connections to subscribers' homes--so the material does not have to traverse the clog-prone public Internet to reach subscribers.
Critics say that system in effect allows Excite@Home to control what content reaches its subscribers, a perversion of the Internet's democratic principles.
