Internet Architecture and Innovation [Hardcover]

Barbara van van Schewick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 2010

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

The Internet's original architecture was based on four design principles: modularity, layering, and two versions of the celebrated but often misunderstood end-to-end arguments. But today, the Internet's architecture is changing in ways that deviate from the Internet's original design principles, removing the features that have fostered innovation and threatening the Internet's ability to spur economic growth, to improve democratic discourse, and to provide a decentralized environment for social and cultural interaction in which anyone can participate. If no one intervenes, network providers' interests will drive networks further away from the original design principles. If the Internet's value for society is to be preserved, van Schewick argues, policymakers will have to intervene and protect the features that were at the core of the Internet's success.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is an important piece of policy work and anyone who cares about the Internet ought to give it a read." Fred Wilson, A VC blog

"...Internet Architecture and Innovation is an important work: it supplies a key piece of the broadband puzzle in its consideration of broadband transport as a necessary input for other businesses…van Schewick's fundamental premise rings true: only neutral networks promote competition and innovation." ars technica

"This is a tour de force on the topic of the end-to-end principle in the design of the Internet." Daniel E. Atkins, W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information, Professor of Information and EECS, and Associate Vice-President for Research Cyberinfrastructure, University of Michigan

"This is an important book, one which for the first time ties together the many emerging threads that link the economic, technical, architectural, legal, and social frameworks of the birth and evolution of the Internet." David P. Reed, MIT Media Laboratory

"This isn't a flash in the pan piece. This book will be an evergreen in a wide range of academic and policy contexts more than an introduction to how technology and policy should be analyzed, it is, in my view, the very best example of that analysis." Lawrence Lessig, author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

About the Author

Barbara van Schewick is Associate Professor of Law and Helen L. Crocker Faculty Schoar 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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; New edition (June 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262013975
• ISBN-13: 978-0262013970
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,020,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Barbara van Schewick is an Associate Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, an Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Department of Electrical Engineering, and the Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. Her book Internet Architecture and Innovation was published by MIT Press in July 2010.

van Schewick's research on the economic, regulatory, and strategic implications of communication networks has made her a leading expert on the issue of network neutrality, perhaps the Internet's most debated policy issue, which concerns Internet users' ability to access the content and software of their choice without interference from network providers. Her papers on network neutrality have influenced regulatory debates in the United States, Canada and Europe.

In 2007, van Schewick was one of three academics who, together with public interest groups, filed the petition that started the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality inquiry into Comcast's blocking of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer protocols. She has testified before the FCC in en banc hearings and official workshops. She co-authored an amicus brief - along with Professors Jack Balkin, Lawrence Lessig, and Tim Wu, among others - defending the FCC order that ordered Comcast to stop interfering with BitTorrent.

For a longer bio, see http://www.netarchitecture.org/author/.

van Schewick's blog can be found at http://www.netarchitecture.org/blog.
You can follow her on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/vanschewick.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most important books in tech policy in a decade August 13, 2010

By Marvin Ammori

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is an important and brilliant book, which I consider required reading for anyone interested in or serious about the Internet or innovation.

I have written a review of this book on my blog ([...]) and on the Huffington Post.

As I say there, this book is one of the very few books in the field of Internet policy that is in the same league as Larry Lessig's Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0, in 2000, and Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, in 2006, in terms of its originality, depth, and importance to Internet policy and other disciplines. I expect the book to affect how people think about the Internet; about the interactions between law and technical architectures in all areas of law; about entrepreneurship in general. I also think her insights on innovation economics, which strike me as far more persuasive than lawyers' usual assumptions, should influence "law and economics" thinking for the better.

Books this good don't come along every day--or even every year-and I'm already late to the praise-party. Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig (the trail-blazing cyberlaw champion) recommended it in the New York Times this week; Susan Crawford (a law professor who served as a top White House advisor) recommended it in an op-ed in Salon/GigaOm yesterday; Brad Burnham, the venture capitalist who was featured earlier this week in the NYT's Room for Debate, also posted an endorsing review on his blog.... MIT engineering professor David Reed (one of the key architects of the IP protocol, inventor of the UDP protocol) praises it on the book jacket.

It is not easy material--the Internet's technologies and how innovation actually evolves--but she writes for a general audience, not a technologist or lawyer, and you will learn a lot from, and be challenged by, the ideas in this book. Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Run, don't walk, to buy this book April 14, 2011

By Christopher Parsons

Format:Hardcover

I want to very highly recommend this book. Various authors, advocates, scholars, and businesses have spoken about the economic impacts of the Internet, but to date there hasn't been a detailed economic accounting of what may happen if/when ISPs monitor and control the flow of data across their networks. van Schewick has filled this gap.

Her book traces economic impacts associated with changing the Internet's structure from one enabling any innovator to design an application or share content online to a structure where ISPs must first authorize access to content and design key applications (e.g. P2P, email, etc) in house. Barbara draws heavily from Internet history literatures and economic theory to buttress her position that a closed or highly controlled Internet not only constitutes a massive change in the architecture of the 'net, but that this change would be damaging to society's economic, cultural, and political interests. She argues that an increasingly controlled Internet is the future that many ISPs prefer, and supports this conclusion with economic theory and the historical actions of American telecommunications corporations.

van Schewick begins by outlining two notions of the end-to-end principle undergirding the 'net, a narrow and broad conception, and argues (successfully, in my mind) that ISPs and their interrogators often rely on different end-to-end understandings in making their respective arguments to the public, regulators, and each other. This reliance on differing notions of end-to-end have led the defenders of these differing shades of the end-to-end principle to speak past one another.... Further, divergent understandings of the end-to-end architectural discussion has created, and continues to create, rifts between engineers, between those who were (and remain) central to the development of the 'net more generally, and between those publishing technically informed economic writings about the Internet.

After differentiating between the narrow and broad approaches to end-to-end, van Schewick identifies the impacts of different Internet architectures on the costs of innovation, the resulting organizational makeup of innovating parties, and the effects architecture has on the competition of complementary goods (e.g. VoIP, filesharing, email, etc as opposed to the actual hardware composing the Internet). After laying this groundwork, van Schewick works through how deviations from the 'broad' end-to-end argument affect innovation and the consequences of centralized versus decentralized application development and content distribution. The book concludes with an analysis of the public versus private interests in network architectures, with the author asserting that citizens and their public representatives must understand the impacts of architecture on the Internet's future. ISPs are attempting to better control and monetize their networks, and these attempts may undermine the possibilities of innovation while sacrificing the long-term evolution of the 'net so that companies can realize short-term profits. Such sacrifices must be critically interrogated by a public that is increasingly relying on digital communications in all facets of life and business.

This is a heavy read, a read made heavier if you haven't spent some time reading economic theory, elements of the network neutrality debates of the past decade, and a little on the evolution of American telecommunications in the past two decades. This said, the author generally does a terrific job in walking the reader through every facet of her argument, using examples and sidenotes to expand and clarify more troublesome sections of the book (especially as it relates to economic theory and approaches to innovation). I highly recommend this book - it's worth every penny that it will cost you. It also includes an extensive set of citations and reference list (about 160 pages worth) that will be helpful for any subsequent research or reading beyond the text itself.

If I have a criticism of the book it's that it tends to be very American-centric. While the principles contained in the book remain general enough that readers can lay the theoretical model she traces upon the telecommunications landscape of non-US states, this is a bit of work that non-American readers will have to do when examining their own telecommunications landscape through her lens. This may somewhat limit the book's immediate guidance to policy makers, policy analysts, economists, Internet governance scholars, and concerned/interested citizens more generally, but not so much that any of these readers should stay away.

I have a suspicion that this book will become one of the centrepieces for Internet governance literatures in coming years, and likely to be as influential Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom with regards to the economics of the Internet. If issues around Internet governance, innovation, and control are your cup of tea then consider this book an absolute must buy. Read more ›

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Important May 11, 2011

By Tim Wu

Format:Hardcover

This book is the most comprehensive study of the issues surrounding Internet Innovation, Net Neutrality, and related issues. It lays the intellectual foundation for Internet policy over the next decade. In particular, this book offers powerful non-market power based reasons to favor non-discrimination policies for internet traffic. Highly recommended.

4 of 10 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars whither net neutrality? September 10, 2010

By jomamma

Format:Hardcover

A good part of the book is devoted to the history and technical architecture of the internet. Light reference to the burning issue of net neutrality and extensive discussion of its surrogate "end-to-end arguments" of the narrow and broad types is puzzling. The internet is not end-to-end but based on hops, box 3.4, as stated on p. 384, so what is the big deal with end-to-end hop-less connectivity, except for real-time communication which was not part of the original design of the internet? This is the first time I learned that Salzer, Reed and Clark (1981) take credit for original "end-to-end" arguments (p. 58), overshadowing Vinton Cerf, Bob Kahn and Jon Postel who "invented" the Internet well before 1981. van Schewich ought to explain why she considers Salzer et al phrase "end-to-end" to be the catchphrase and linguistic keyword for the entire book, instead of relegating it to a mere historical artifact.

Ignoring the unnecessary exposition on the Application/ Transport/ Internet and Link layers, known to every Cisco technician, van Schewich deserves credit for building the next two sections of the book: Net Neutrality and competition, and Net Neutrality and innovation. van Schewich comprehensively surveys the literature of the internet + competition (Varian genre) and internet+innovation (von Hippel genre). The conclusions are predictably unpalatable to the financial health of Comcast and Verizon, that erosion of transparent "end-to-end" connectivity (net neutrality) would be anti-competitive and would stifle innovation.