Internet Architecture and Innovation

Today--following housing bubbles, bank collapses, and high unemployment--the Internetremains the most reliable mechanism for fostering innovation and creating new wealth. The Internet'sremarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. In this pathbreaking book, Barbara van Schewickargues that this explosion of innovation is not an accident, but a consequence of the Internet'sarchitecture--a consequence of technical choices regarding the Internet's inner structure that weremade early in its history.

The Internet's original architecture was based on fourdesign principles: modularity, layering, and two versions of the celebrated but often misunderstoodend-to-end arguments. But today, the Internet's architecture is changing in ways that deviate fromthe Internet's original design principles, removing the features that have fostered innovation andthreatening the Internet's ability to spur economic growth, to improve democratic discourse, and toprovide a decentralized environment for social and cultural interaction in which anyone canparticipate. If no one intervenes, network providers' interests will drive networks further awayfrom the original design principles. If the Internet's value for society is to be preserved, vanSchewick argues, policymakers will have to intervene and protect the features that were at the coreof the Internet's success.

Barbara van Schewick is Associate Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering in Stanford University's Department of Electrical Engineering.