The evolving accidental information super-highway

The technology of the Internet is not static. Although its 'end-to-end' arc hitecture has made this 'connection-less' communications system readily 'ex tensible', and highly encouraging to innovation both in hardware and softwa re applications, there are strong pressures for engineering changes. Some o f these are wanted to support novel transport services (e.g. voice telephon y, real-time video); others would address drawbacks that appeared with the opening of the Internet to public and commercial traffic-e.g. the difficult ies of blocking delivery of offensive content, suppressing malicious action s (e.g. 'denial of service' attacks), pricing bandwidth usage to reduce con gestion. The expected gains from making improvements in the core of the net work should be weighed against the loss of the social and economic benefits that derive from the end-to-end architectural design. Even where technolog ical 'fixes' can be placed at the networks' edges, the option remains to se arch for alternative, institutional mechanisms of governing conduct in cybe rspace.