[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Internet 2
Clearly, the Internet is now firmly established as the major commercial and consumer pathway to electronic information resources for both historical database providers such as Dialog or LEXIS-NEXIS and for the plethora of new and old content from government and private sources flowing onto the World Wide Web. And all of the Net-and Web-born electronic resources come to the users under a bewildering range of constantly-shifting economic models. Every searcher today uses the Internet routinely as a way to reach traditional sources and as a tool to search for information from the new sources. The Internet is no longer merely a place for researchers to communicate, exchange data, and obtain access to supercomputers, as was the case in its early days. It has become an integral part of the corporate and consumer mainstream.
We have begun to hear about new developments, such as 2 and the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, and about a new generation of advanced, high-performance applications these new developments will empower.
Today's commercial Internet in the United States is completing a transition from a largely government-supported system designed to serve research, higher education, and federal agency missions to a public networking infrastructure serving businesses and consumers. The federal government's role was largely eliminated in the mid-1990s when the National Science Foundation phased out NSFNET. In recent months, the last of certain support functions having to do with the management of network numbers, the domain name system, and related activities has gone to the private sector or to non-governmentally supported, not-for-profit international organizations. While the issues involved in such transfers are very important, they have little to do with the day-today user of the Internet. The private corporations that currently offer Internet services have a massive program of capitol investment, capacity expansion, consolidation, and service refinement underway that will likely continue for some years to come. Basically, the corporate sector faces the basic issues of keeping up with growing demand for connectivity, capacity, and service quality, and doing so while making a profit....
