Evolution of Internet interconnection : opinion paper
Jeroen Bosman, B.M.M. Gijsen · TNO Repository · 2020
The Internet has become the fundament for digital services that have transformed every-day-life around the globe.It has been an enabler for many innovations that boost social and economic prosperity.At the same time the internet's growing popularity also introduces concerns, amongst others about cyber security, dependability and privacy protection.Consequently, Internet related opportunities and concerns are on the agenda of policymakers, occasionally arousing debate and calls for action.Recent debate has been caused by dominant content and cloud service providers that are creating global, private network infrastructures for deploying their services.While governments have stimulated business drivers for boosting internet use, the increasing hold of business drivers on the internet infrastructure is perceived as threatening.This leads to calls for action, amongst others, regarding digital sovereignty by governments around the globe.Recent examples include the Internet Governance Forum session about Digital sovereignty (Internet Governance Forum, 2019) and the United Nations cybercrime-focused resolution that aims to provide government more control over the Internet (United Nations, 2019).Effective policymaking regarding this topic requires up-to-date understanding of the Internet infrastructure and its ecosystem.From the perspective of this paper 'the Internet' is constituted by interconnected data communication networks around the globe.In particular, we focus on the interconnections between the networks (the core of the Internet), as opposed to the 'last-mile' communication inside the networks that connects communication end-users. SummaryDuring the evolution of Internet interconnectivity its topology has been shaped by the drivers of the dominant stakeholders.After the academic inception phase the dominant stakeholders have been those that were most successful in commercial exploitation of the global Internet infrastructure.The highlights of this evolution are presented in the following table.