On the evolution of Internet technologies

The Internet has been evolving from its origins in the early 1970s, based on work sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. While the basic design was known in 1973 and first published in 1974 and the system essentially deployed in the academic and military communities on January 1, 1983, much has happened in the intervening 20 years. The first commercial Internet services emerged in 1989 after the interconnection of the Internet to commercial e-mail services. By 1993, commercial versions of the World Wide Web had appeared, and by 2003, voice over IP service was growing rapidly, after its first commercial introduction around 1995 (See Vocaltec: http://www.vocaltec.com/html/about/company.shtml). The Internet of the future will be shaped by the tectonic forces of regulation, commercialization, technological change, and a wide range of policy concerns expressed at local, national, regional and international levels. In this paper, the effect of these forces is considered and an attempt made to project their effects into the future.