Group members expect deeper penetration into the user base, and also a broadening of the applications that people use. Electronic commerce, public data and government access applications are obvious areas where millions of nodes will interact. There are clear implications of a need for directory services, routing tables and application design to accommodate millions of nodes. There is general agreement that privacy and security will be required by most applications. These demands are not just driven by traditional military and intelligence concerns, but also by rising public demands for secure financial transactions and personal records.
Basic security is essential to trustworthy operations.
The first round of new applications will capitalize on these abilities, and will combine them in a variety of ways. The first experiments should, therefore, be planned around these technologies, with an eye to testing the limits of implementability, manageability and performance. Some network users are alarmed at the increasing size of databases. The public World Wide Web contains hundreds of gigabytes. Large corporate databases often measure in terabytes.