Forces Shaping the Future of the Internet
Speaker: David Clark, PhD, MS, An Inventor of the Internet; Technical Director at MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative
In the early days of the Internet, technical innovation shaped its future. Today, issues of economics, market dynamics, incentives, and some fundamental aspects of networked systems shape the future. This talk will summarize eleven forces that are shaping the future of the Internet and make an argument that we are at a point of inflection in the character of the Internet, as profound as the change in the 1990’s when the Internet was commercialized.
David Clark, MS, PhD, led the development of the Internet. Since the mid-'70s, Clark has been leading the development of the Internet; from 1981-1989 he acted as Chief Protocol Architect in its development and chaired the Internet Activities Board. Today, Dr. Clark is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is Technical Director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative. His current research looks at re-definition of the architectural underpinnings of the Internet, and the relation of technology and architecture to economic, societal and policy considerations.
Dr. Clark is former chairman of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies and has contributed to a number of studies on the societal and policy impact of computer communications. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as a member of the AAAS Council.
Dr. Clark graduated from Swarthmore College in 1966 and received his PhD from MIT in 1973. He has worked since then at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (formerly the Laboratory for Computer Science), where he is currently a Senior Research Scientist. Dr. Clark's research interests include networks, network protocols, operating systems, distributed systems, and computer and communications security. After receiving his PhD, he worked on the early stages of the ARPAnet and managed the development of one of the first host implementations of the ARPA network protocols. Following this effort, he worked on local area network technology, and was one of the developers of the token ring LAN. This effort led directly to commercial products and helped stimulate the IEEE 802.5 token ring standard. In 2018, he published the book Designing an Internet.
