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Chapter 7 Telecommunications, the Internet, and Wireless Technology 291

Local connection lines are owned by regional telephone and cable television
companies in the United States that connect retail users in homes and busi-
nesses to the Internet. The regional networks lease access to ISPs, private com-
panies, and government institutions.
Each organization pays for its own networks and its own local Internet
connection services, a part of which is paid to the long-distance trunk line
owners. Individual Internet users pay ISPs for using their service, and they
generally pay a flat subscription fee, no matter how much or how little they
use the Internet. A debate is now raging on whether this arrangement should
continue or whether heavy Internet users who download large video and music
files should pay more for the bandwidth they consume. The Interactive Session
on Organizations explores this topic, by examining the pros and cons of network
neutrality.
No one “owns” the Internet, and it has no formal management. However,
worldwide Internet policies are established by a number of professional orga-
nizations and government bodies, including the Internet Architecture Board
(IAB), which helps define the overall structure of the Internet; the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which assigns IP
addresses; and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which sets Hypertext
Markup Language and other programming standards for the Web.
These organizations influence government agencies, network owners,
ISPs, and software developers with the goal of keeping the Internet operat-
ing as efficiently as possible. The Internet must also conform to the laws
of the sovereign nation-states in which it operates, as well as the techni-
cal infrastructures that exist within the nation-states. Although in the early
years of the Internet and the Web there was very little legislative or executive
interference, this situation is changing as the Internet plays a growing role in
the distribution of information and knowledge, including content that some
find objectionable.

The Future Internet: IPv6 and Internet2
The Internet was not originally designed to handle the transmission of
massive quantities of data and billions of users. Because many corporations
and governments have been given large blocks of millions of IP addresses to
accommodate current and future workforces, and because of sheer Internet
population growth, the world is about to run out of available IP addresses using
the old addressing convention. The old addressing system is being replaced
by a new version of the IP addressing schema called IPv6 (Internet Protocol
version 6), which contains 128-bit addresses (2 to the power of 128), or more
than a quadrillion possible unique addresses. IPv6 is not compatible with the
existing Internet addressing system, so the transition to the new standard will
take years.
Internet2 is an advanced networking consortium representing over
350 U.S. universities, private businesses, and government agencies work-
ing with 66,000 institutions across the United States and international net-
working partners from more than 50 countries. To connect these commu-
nities, Internet2 developed a high-capacity 100 Gbps network that serves
as a testbed for leading-edge technologies that may eventually migrate to
the public Internet, including telemedicine, distance learning, and other
advanced applications not possible with consumer-grade Internet services.
The fourth generation of this network is being rolled out to provide 8.8
terabits of capacity.

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