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There is another aspect of generality: the applications that run over the basic transport service of the Internet are not designed or distributed by the same entity that provides the basic data-transport service. This characteristic has been called the “open” Internet, and again, this separation made sense to a computer engineer but did not fit conceptually with the telecommunication engineer. The telephone company installed that wire to your house to sell you telephone service, not to enable some other company
to sell you theirs. From the telephone company’s perspective, it is expensive to install all those wires, and how could they get a reasonable return on investment if they were not the exclusive service provider?
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That was a fork in the road, and the Internet certainly might have taken another path. In fact, the force that led the Internet toward residential broadband was, to a considerable extent, the emergence of the cable television industry as a credible and competitive provider of high-speed residential Internet. We continue to see echoes of this tension between the Internet as an open platform for third-party applications and broadband access as an expensive investment that should work to the advantage of its owner. The current debates around the concept of “network neutrality” are at their heart about whether broadband providers should be regulated to provide a neutral, open platform for third-party services, or if they have the right to define the services they offer (and perhaps favor) over the infrastructure they invested in building.
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The Internet has been called the stupid network, the telephone system being the intelligent network; the open-design approach of the Internet makes perfect sense – that is, until things go wrong. If the network itself is impairing the operation of an application, the network cannot always detect or correct this. The network may be able to detect that one of its components has failed, but more complex failures may go undetected, leaving frustrated users who can see that their application is not working, but who have
no remedy available to them. Had we taken the fork in the road that enabled the network to know more about what each applica tion application was trying to do, the network might have been less supportive of easy innovation, but might also have been less frustrating to use when unexpected problems inevitably arose.
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