The architects of the Internet have always prided themselves on its distributed intelligence and ability to deliver a high level of control over network functions to individual users. For a number of reasons, Internet2 and related next-generation development efforts are going to involve more sharing and more compromises than is the case today. In particular, the building of new network services that include such features as integrated voice, video and data, and the availability of these features on a real-time basis, will increase the aggregate bandwidth requirement for university networks by several orders of magnitude over the next five years. Although there are projections of fiber optic bandwidth cost reductions that ultimately will offset much of this volume increase, the path to such reduced costs is going to be tortuous. The federal and state governments have only partially completed the creation of a competitive marketplace for network connectivity, and the resulting market uncertainties are constraining the allocation of capital to investment in production network facilities.
Interoperability is a second area where greater coordination is going to be essential.
As new functionality and accompanying complexity are added to the network, the requirement for many more hardware and software components to operate in perfect unison increases dramatically. Members of the project, which now includes nearly all of the more than 100 American research universities, believe this community effort will have a major payoff in bringing next-generation networks and applications to their campuses sooner and at lower cost than would be the case if the process were left solely to private market forces. But it won't be easy. Inside every shared academic resource can easily be a latent tragedy of the commons. Everyone's resource is no one's responsibility.