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IP: The Self-Governing Internet: Coordination by Design
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 15:37:12 -0500
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. ....
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