The League of SuperNets

T he Internet revolution is over, the debris has been swept away, and we’ve supposedly recovered from the hangover. Yet the economy remains mired in a listless cycle of anemic recoveries and shallow downturns. The tech sector is soft, and unemployment remains high. Nonetheless, we can reignite the fires. In this column, I propose a major effort to transform the Internet into a league of SuperNets. Doing so offers the promise of revolutionary new business opportunities for companies large and small, and could save the emerging Web services technology area from a snarl of reliability and security problems. We can slash the costs of operating big networks, roll out new kinds of applications with real-time properties, and start to build other kinds of applications for purposes like controlling the restructured electrical power grid or managing military assets on a battlefield — applications that the Internet just wasn’t designed to tackle. Unfortunately, however, the following proposal departs drastically from the way that the Internet is currently evolving. The technical side of the issue is likely to be the easy part; the daunting problem centers on the politics of the Internet sector and the community that controls its future. Yet, the payoff could be so great that I want to argue for a community response. If we all get behind a common vision, we can make it a reality. The Shot Heard Round the Web What would it take to start a new dotcom boom? Viewed almost a decade after the fact, it seems clear that the first boom was triggered by much more than the emergence of Web browsers. Personally, I’ve always viewed Windows 95’s introduction as the watershed event, and not just because it triggered a 25-fold run-up of Microsoft share prices—the first taste of irrational exuberance. The real significance was that literally everyone upgraded to Windows 95, overnight. Microsoft created a new business model, simultaneously opening a major new market for PC software and gaining a tremendous jolt of revenue. It suddenly became clear that even large companies needn’t settle for slow market growth. With the right product and story, a company could earn hundreds of billions of dollars overnight. The Windows 95 rollout became a template from which the subsequent dot-com boom was cut. As the Web caught on, just about every vendor you could name was holding all-hands meetings to strategize about the next new thing. What stands out, in retrospect, is the degree to which the Web played directly into this emerging market dynamic. Suddenly, vendor after vendor rolled out a new Web-enabled upgrade for every product line, and in a flash of Internet time, these new solutions transformed the market. I believe this was the real core of the dot-com event: a technology shift exciting enough to get everyone to spend money on IT infrastructure and upgrades — not just on new products, but on old ones, too. I’m no economist, but this is the insight that motivates the remainder of this column — a technical proposal that is ultimately aimed at restarting the stalled dot-com revolution, although perhaps without the sky-high share prices.