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The Rise and Stall of the Generative Net
knaves would be absent. Banks would be simpler and more efficient if they did
not need vaults for the cash but could instead keep it in accessible bins in plain
view. Our houses would be simpler if we did not have locks on our doors, and
it would be ideal to catch a flight by following an unimpeded path from the airport
entrance to the gate—the way access to many trains and buses persists today.
An almost casual trust for the users of secured institutions and systems is
rarely found: banks are designed with robbers in mind. Yet the assumption that
network participants can be trusted, and indeed that they will be participants
rather than customers, infuses the Internet’s design at nearly every level. Anyone
can become part of the network so long as any existing member of the network
is ready to share access. And once someone is on the network, the network’s
design is intended to allow all data to be treated the same way: it can be
sent from anyone to anyone, and it can be in support of any application developed
by an outsider.
Two examples illustrate these principles and their trade-offs: the Internet’s
lack of structure to manage personal identity, and its inability to guarantee
transmission speed between two points.
There are lots of reasons for a network to be built to identify the people using
it, rather than just the machines found on it. Proprietary networks like
CompuServe and AOL were built just that way. They wanted to offer different
services to different people, and to charge them accordingly, so they ensured
that the very first prompt a user encountered when connecting to the network
was to type in a prearranged user ID and password. No ID, no network access.
This had the added benefit of accountability: anyone engaging in bad behavior
on the network could have access terminated by whoever managed the IDs.
The Internet, however, has no such framework; connectivity is much more
readily shared. User identification is left to individual Internet users and
servers to sort out if they wish to demand credentials of some kind from those
with whom they communicate. For example, a particular Web site might demand
that a user create an ID and password in order to gain access to its contents.
This basic design omission has led to the well-documented headaches of
identifying wrongdoers online, from those who swap copyrighted content to
hackers who attack the network itself. 47 At best, a source of bad bits might be
traced to a single Internet address. But that address might be shared by more
than one person, or it might represent a mere point of access by someone at yet
another address—a link in a chain of addresses that can recede into the dis-