IP: The Self-Governing Internet: Coordination by Design

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Well worth looking at 


http://ccs.mit.edu/ccswp197.html


The Self-Governing Internet: Coordination by Design




Sharon Eisner Gillett, Research Affiliate




Center for Coordination Science, Sloan School of Management, MIT




Mitchell Kapor, Adjunct Professor




Media Arts and Sciences, MIT








Prepared for:




Coordination and Administration of the Internet




Workshop at Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University




September 8-10, 1996




Introduction 


If the Internet were an organization, how would we describe its management? 


To answer this question, we first distinguish two extremes of management
style: centralized and decentralized. In the centralized extreme, managers
make their presence essential to most day-to-day functioning. Without their
involvement, little information would be exchanged and few decisions would
be made. Managers have lots of power, but they can never take a vacation. 


In contrast, in the decentralized organization, managers create systems
that allow their organizations to run without them most of the time. All
routine events, constituting 99% of organizational life, are handled by
members of the organization empowered by the system. The manager's roles
are to set up the initial system, to integrate new activities into it as
they emerge, and to deal with the 1% of truly exceptional events. 


Contrary to its popular portrayal as total anarchy, the Internet is
actually managed. It runs like a decentralized organization, but without a
single person or organization filling the manager's role. The system that
allows 99% of day-to-day operations to be coordinated without a central
authority is embedded in the technical design of the Internet. The
manager's job - handling the exceptional 1% -- is performed by not one but
several organizations. 


As the size, international scope, and financial importance of the Internet
continues to grow, Internet management is perceived to be coming under
increasing pressure. Internet technology is called on to coordinate a
system of unprecedented scale and complexity. The organizations that fill
the Internet's managerial role today do so mostly as an accident of
history, and the legitimacy of these arrangements is increasingly
questioned. The intent of this workshop is to identify the organizational
and technical pressures in the coordination of today's Internet and discuss
what changes may best relieve them. 


Informed discussion of potential changes requires, however, that the
decentralized organizational model of the Internet first be properly
understood. It can be especially difficult to understand which coordination
issues are handled by the 99% system, and which fall into the 1% category
that truly requires managerial intervention. Without this understanding,
there is a dangerous temptation to apply big hammers to coordination
problems that are properly viewed as small nails. This risk is especially
great for the many people who, because of the realities of exponential
growth, have not grown up with the Internet (so to speak) but will help to
chart its future. Although the Internet looks quite different from
traditional communications infrastructures (such as the telephone system,
and the mass media of print, radio and TV), there is a natural tendency to
apply the better understood, more centralized mindset associated with these
systems to the Internet's coordination problems. 


The aim of this paper is to provide context for the rest of the workshop by
giving participants a deeper understanding of the Internet's current
coordination system. It begins by describing the decentralized nature of
the Internet: how the 99% looks different from more traditional
infrastructures, and the design of the underlying technical and cultural
system for coordination. This system relies much more heavily on automation
and loosely-unified heterogeneity than on institutions and
centrally-dictated uniformity. By demonstrating the link between this
approach and the Internet's success, we hope to give newcomers a gut-level
trust in the power of the Internet's unusual organizational model. For
old-timers, we offer a new, more socially-oriented interpretation of what
is already familiar technically. 


Next the paper lays out the 1% category, describing what the exceptional
functions are, how they are managed today, and where the stresses lie in
the current system. 


Instead of proposing specific changes (a difficult job that we leave to
those more directly involved in the process), the paper concludes with a
list of questions to ask about proposed changes. These questions are
intended to determine how well each proposal enhances, or at least does not
detract from, the Internet's distinguishing social, economic and political
properties -- its highly-valued openness, diversity and dynamism. 


....