Purpose vs discovery and the Internet as a dynamic

Excellent Article:

http://frankston.com/public/?n=PurposeVsDiscovery


By Bob Frankston

How to make sure that the Internet continues to "work" despite P2P or whatever the current threat seems to be. 


Yesterday we feared modems, today we fear P2P.


Meeting the demand for "web bits" had a side-effect of giving us copious capacity and the low latency, low jitter application started to "just work". But we mustn't forget that this is a process of discovery not one of promise. We might argue against the asymmetric "broadband" connections but we also discovered that they are indeed useful for video, especially since that was the original purpose of the underlying architecture.