Internet2 Turns 15. Has It Delivered?

stinkymountain writes "With nearly $100 million in new funding, Internet2, the faster, better Internet reserved for research and education, has embarked on an upgrade that will boost backbone capacity to a staggering 8.8Tbps and expand services to hundreds of thousands of libraries, schools and medical centers. Internet2 was created by 34 university research institutions in 1996, when the commercial and non-commercial branches of the Internet's evolutionary tree split off and went their separate ways. The mission of Internet2 was to provide reliable, dedicated bandwidth to support the ever-growing demands of the research and educational communities, and in doing so, to develop technologies that would advance the state of the 'commodity' Internet. Some say it has failed in that latter category."

Comments

Yeah, thanks to wikis and open source

[HalAtWork]

It definitely has, thanks to the revolution of the wiki. If it weren't for that, the internet would have jumped the shark. Wikis truly brought us Web 2.0 as far as users are concerned. It's a shining example of how the internet is truly interactive and collaborative, and it's one of the few methods that consistently upholds the basic principles of what the web should be. OSS has also proliferated and grown thanks to the internet, and has in turn enabled better services from a wider variety of non-commercial entities. The spirit behind phenomenons such as OSS has also permeated the web, for example we have creative commons content, massive public domain efforts. We also have a brilliant distribution methods that peers independent producers with massive commercial business. Hopefully the internet will continue to uphold equality, freedom, creativity, sharing, and collaboration.