Major technological shifts are now occurring in the architecture and operation of the Internet. For example, an e-mail message from a faculty member in Boulder to a researcher in Michigan left the Boulder campus, joined the NSFnet backbone that passed through NCAR and dropped off the backbone to a local link at Michigan. Traffic between the two will be routed through a network exchange in New York. The new model has the benefit of being scalable and privately operated but is complicated and depends on cooperative arrangements among an increasing number of participants. There is much uneasiness over how the policies and practices of all these new players will be coordinated.
Major changes are also likely in the economics of networking and networked information.
With the privati- zation of the Internet, that will likely change. We will also see the rise of priced information on the net. Mechanisms to do this are currently being developed, including license servers, netcash, and the ability to aggregate microbills economically. Some of these changes are already apparent at the University. We are slowly migrating our traffic over to our new links.