General Internet

Content and Connection in a Broadband World
By Jeanne Marie Follman
Broadband access to the Internet is finally becoming available in our neighborhood. When we sign up for it, we will have Internet access that is high speed and always on. That will be great. But what will happen when the younger members of the household go online using their favorite software?...This question highlights the problem of combining both content and connection into a single product—a practice known as bundling—as we move into a world of broadband access to the Internet.

The Internet Is Everything--and Other Dramatic Overstatements
By Wendy Rickard
Today we are on the cusp of major new developments in both the technical and policy aspects of the Internet--which explains why it is so difficult to avoid hyperbole when discussing it. From the domain-naming system to copyrights, to censorship, the issues are hot and the stakes are high. The bottom line? Expect the Internet--and the drama--to continue.

Waiting for Synthesis
By Wendy Rickard
The only thing more predictable than the hype surrounding the Internet is the skepticism that quickly replaced it. If the recent flood of technodoubting tells us anything, it should remind us that it is the combination of promise and doubt that leads to success.

Internetship: Good Citizenship on the Internet
By Nicholas R. Trio
More people than ever are participating in cybercafés, cybernewsstands, and cyber front offices, proving that the Internet has become the place to meet, attend classes, and work. As its function within society grows, so does the need for a commonly shared set of guidelines defining acceptable and unacceptable behaviors.

Back to the Future
By Donald M. Heath
The generation and distribution of electricity spawned whole industries and eventually led to a decidedly different role for power companies than originally imagined. That parallel process is happening today with relation to the Internet. How will the telecommunications companies and the PTTs of the world manage this opportunity?

Networking

Mapping Where the Data Flows
By Martin Dodge

The Network Is the Market: Financing Internet Bandwidth
By John du Pre Gauntt
Although the public relishes the idea of unimpeded access to an endless flow of free information, the reality of the current bandwidth market shows startling price differentials and areas where service simply does not exist.

Fixing the Internet
By Wendy Rickard
Initiatives such as Internet 2 may offer relief from the network congestion and traffic that are frustrating users, but there are many other problems with the Internet that need to be fixed.

Do Internet Addresses Have a Value?
By Geoff Huston
In today's mass marketing of the Internet, IP addresses have a perceived if undefinable value. It is the relationship between its uniqueness, routability, contiguous size, and utility factor that may be the key to uncovering its true value.

Seeding Networks: The Federal Role
By Larry Press
From Claude Chappe's semaphore towers to Morse's telegraph to ARPANET, the federal government-both abroad and within the United States-has historically been a vital force in getting technological development up, rolling, and to the people.

E-Commerce

India’s IT Bill Follows the UNCITRAL’s Model Law on E-Commerce
By Madanmohan Rao

The Evolution of Quality of Service: Where Are We Heading?
By Paul Ferguson and Geoff Huston
Now that the Internet has moved from research project to full-fledged business activity, it’s hard to dismiss the poor service quality that is frequently experienced. Two leading experts detail the metrics of service quality and spell out their strategies to improve the flow of traffic.

Creating Brand Identity on the Internet
By Arthur Goldstuck
Corporations invest huge sums of money creating brand identity in the marketplace only to find that things aren’t the same in cyberspace. The author points out the more common mistakes big-name companies make when trying to leverage their brands on the Net.

Sound Bites and Document Bites versus Electronic Message Bytes: A Comparison of the Intrinsic Security of Media for Credit Card Transactions
By Lloyd Conklin
When it comes to Internet security, both popular opinion and hard facts support the age-old adage, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Random Thoughts on Delivering End-to-End Quality of Service on the Internet
By Paul Ferguson
Delivering quality of service is more important than ever for reasons of congestion and simple commercial differentiation. But what is the long-term implication of such prioritization? And will it work?

Education

Any Path Will Do
Robert C. Heterick finds that as traditional colleges and universities feint, dodge, weave, stumble and sometimes fumble in their move toward the incorporation of technology- based learning strategies, a sort of Alice in Wonderland aura permeates the educational landscape--if you don't know where you are going, any path will do.

Distance Education: An Oxymoron?
By Carol Twigg
The Chronicle of Higher Education published a review of a new book, The Social Life of Information. The authors believe that proponents of IT suffer from "tunnel vision" that prevents them from seeing that learning is a social experience for which distance-education technology is a poor substitute.

Distance Education: An Oxymoron?
By Carol Twigg
The Chronicle of Higher Education published a review of a new book, The Social Life of Information. According to the reviewer, the authors believe that proponents of IT suffer from "tunnel vision" that prevents them from seeing that learning is a social experience for which distance-education technology is a poor substitute.

Guidelines for Computer-Based Testing
By James B. Olsen
Computers are now standard and pervasive tools that significantly affect our daily lives. In testing and assessment applications, they have changed the ways in which tests and assessments are developed and administered.

Online Learning Costs More . . . or Does It?
By Carol A. Twigg

Kidlink Makes a Small World, After All

The Internet Potential for an Education of Hope
By Edwin H. Gragert, Director, I*EARN-USA
All to often, educators focus on the Internet’s storage capabilities and its value as a research tool. But the technology offers instructors and learners more than just access to the world’s biggest library. The author offers ways to take advantage of the Net’s human connective potential to empower students and improve education.

News

February 2000 News Items

News on the Internet: Technologies and Trends
By Dr. Yuri Quintana
The Internet and other multimedia technologies are changing the way we look at news-where it comes from, how it is organized, and how we receive it.

History

A Brief History of the Internet, Part 1
By Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Lawrence G. Roberts, and Stephen Wolff
The authors-several of whom were directly involved in the development and evolution of the Internet-share their views of the Internet's origins and history, concentrating on four distinct aspects: technological, operations and management, social, and commercialization.

Registries/DNS

Happy Trails to Trailing Hyphens

It'sAlreadyTaken.com
By Wendy Rickard
The growing popularity of domain names as commodities is challenging legal and public policy structures as well as the DNS infrastructure. But if cyberspace promises near-limitless resources for businesses and individuals, why are so many worried about getting-and keeping-the domain names they want? It's time to think beyond the code and create a future in which domain names are irrelevant.

What's in a Name? - New Challenges for DNS
By Nicholas Trio
The Domain Name System provides the basis for converting names of machines into IP addresses and back again. It has also become a resource allocator, a marketing tool, and a growing source of frustration for trademark holders.

Encryption

The Perils of the Internet
By Lloyd Conklin
By barring strong encryption for electronic transmissions and implementing encryption-key escrow accounts, governments are asking law-abiding citizens to suffer the consequences of rules meant to be impediments to those who disdain them or who simply go around them.


Developing Countries

Silicon Valley 2: Is higher technology’s future heading south?
By Madanmohan Rao
Like many so-called emerging nations, India’s Internet economy is stunted by inadequate infrastructure and lack of progressive political will regarding Internet policies. But change is imminent. Citing examples gleaned from the recent India Internet World conference in New Dehli, the author explains how India could be the industry’s next Silicon Valley.

Policy Constraints to Electronic Information Sharing in Developing Countries
By Mike Jensen
The author's observations were made during the course of eight years' work to develop Internet access in Africa. His experiences may be of use in other developing countries.

Internet Unwired
By Michiel Hegener
Is the term global Internet really appropriate when hundreds of millions of people in less-developed nations have never heard of datacommunications? To be a truly global Internet means reaching beyond today's traditional fiber-optic communications technologies to some of the unwired alternatives that may help connect the rest of the world.

Will Commercial Networks Prevail in Emerging Nations?
By Larry Press
Part of the Emerging Nations series.

The Internet Society and Developing Countries
By George Sadowsky
Plans to introduce networking into developing countries need to address a multitude of issues, many of which are not generally factors in more-developed countries. Find out what the Internet Society is doing to "bring the Internet where no Net has gone before."

World Wide Web

Words on the Web and the Written Tradition
By Jeanne Marie Follman
In e-mails, chat rooms, Web pages, news groups, and instant messages, countless words fly across the Internet every day; the written word hasn’t seen such a boost since the invention of printing. But despite the newness of the medium, words on the Web fit very snugly into the history of the written tradition. We have been storing our thoughts in various forms of writing for about five or six thousand years. In each case—as with telephones and computers—there is a sender, a signal, and a receiver. The point is the communication of a message.

Search Engines: Gateways to the Digital Economy
Mandanmohan Rao reports from the Search Engine Summit in New York
As entry points to the largest explosion of information the human race has ever seen, Web directories and search engines are increasingly being seen as key gateways to the Internet economy. And new technological innovations, business models, and stupendous investments are being poured into this industry.

Ask Correctly and Ye Shall Receive
By Wendy Rickard
Search technology not only cuts to the core of Internet functionality, it also enables us to explore how the nature of our relationship with information is changing and, in some cases, being formed.

Is the Internet Heading for a Cache Crunch?
By Russell Baird Tewksbury
In an effort to provide more efficient bandwidth and server utilization to customers, network administrators are turning to proxy caching, a technology that relies on the creation of digital duplicates or clones of original Web pages. Can content abuse be far behind?

Find You Find Me
By Susan Estrada
The Internet pioneer and NetPages publisher asks three experts for their views on Internet directory services. Find out what's being done to deliver those services and the broader implications for privacy and security.

Language

Multilingual Publishing on the Asia-Pacific Internet
By Madanmohan Rao
With the percentage of U.S. Internet users as a percentage of worldwide users dropping, the proportion of non-U.S., non-English-speaking Internet users is growing. With many experts betting that content will be the next big Internet driver, companies in the United States and abroad are now venturing into multilingual Web publishing.

Accessibility

Access to the Web: The Cost of Connecting
By David Maher
The Internet Society's VP for Public Policy examines new information and trends concerning the cost of online access worldwide.

Creating an Accessible Internet
By Mary Barros-Bailey

On the Web—and Blind
By Dan Jellinek
For the blind and visually impaired, surfing the Web can be an endless source of anxiety and confusion.

Celluar Communications

On the Net, Through the Air, In Your Hands: Cellular Technology and the Future of the Internet
By Janet Perry
Cell phones and laptops have become increasingly familiar sights at bistros, on the street, and even on the beach. If you're a member of the must-be-connected-without-the-cord crowd, you may soon find yourself updating your home page from those locations as well. Find out where the technology behind the cellular-Internet merger stands and what it may mean for developers, businesspeople, corporations, and the media.

Legal/Regulatory

Cyberliability: New Exposures to Old Risks
By Russell Beck
As Web and e-mail usage skyrocket in the workplace, so does the potential for Internet-related misconduct and lawsuits. What should employers look out for, and what can they do to protect themselves? Russell Beck discusses the growing variety of cyberliability claims.

The Knowledge Roadblock
By Wendy Rickard
Laws about intellectual property could undermine education and research worldwide. Many are still wrestling with connectivity. Will content be available once they're up and running?

Women

Visible Women
By Wendy Rickard
Globally, women produce more than half the food that is grown; yet they own only about 2 percent of all land, a fact that helps keep women in many regions of the world poor. A few organizations are using the Internet to help educate women to become leaders. The results may offer a stunning model of the Internet as a crucial element in the quest for economic equality.

Food, Farming, and Women’s Leadership in Africa: Using Electronic Communications and Training to Change Perceptions and Realities
By Sarah Tisch and Ken Herman
Often times, the largest obstacle to progress--be it economic, social, political, or physical--is a lack of access to information and resources. Winrock International, a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization dedicated to reducing poverty and hunger through sustainable agriculture, natural resource management, and renewable energy, is not just addressing that problem. They’re solving it.