[14034] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
FYI France: France & the Internet, 2001
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Kessler)
Mon Jul 16 08:55:49 2001
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 15:14:33 -0700
From: Jack Kessler <kessler@WELL.COM>
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
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FYI France: France & the Internet, 2001
Internet Domain Survey, total number of hosts -- an update --
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001
.fr 93,041 137,217 245,501 333,306 488,043 779,879 1,229,763
-- so, much accomplished... but then there's also --
.de 207,717 452,997 721,847 994,926 1,316,893 1,702,486 2,163,326
.uk 241,191 451,750 591,624 987,733 1,423,804 1,901,812 2,291,369
.es 28,446 53,707 110,041 168,913 264,245 415,641 663,553
-- so, much still to be done...
(numbers from Network Wizards, http://www.nw.com, see note below)
Some random thoughts about emerging Internet statistics --
The tumult and the shouting dies,
The Captains and the Kings depart...
In the US, the Internet is going through its "commercial
applications" shakeout -- and to some extent shake_down_ -- now.
Internet "dotcom" companies with poor business plans, no business
plans, inexperienced management, insufficient funding (yes there
even were a few of those, hard though that was to imagine only a
few years ago), all are foundering or already have gone under.
"Pets.com", "Furniture.com", "Webvan", any number of ecommerce
"BtoB" and "BtoC" and "B - to - other - things" services all are
gone, now. It may be some time before a company like IBM
proclaims "IBM.COM" again, as that firm did on the cover of a
recent corporate annual report.
How has the Internet been faring elsewhere, outside the US -- in
France, for example?
It is useful to remember that not all of the Internet is ".com".
In the US, the commercial applications proportion may be high,
but then "the business of America is business": not so, perhaps,
in old - fashioned, fuddy - duddy, socialistic and paternalistic
and centralized and hopelessly - bureaucratic France -- which in
all these respects in fact is so much more typical of the rest of
the world than is the very a - typical and eccentric US.
There are, after all, plenty of non - commercial, ".edu" / ".org"
/ ".gov", non - profit - minded, users and applications and
developers and resources on the Internet -- always have been,
since long before the heady days of 1992-3 when the old "no
commercial use" policies suddenly began to disappear, lifting
from the Internet world mysteriously, like some dissipating fog.
Back then -- not even a decade ago, yet -- the _only_ authorized
users were non - profits. If France, and other "foreign" places,
are more like this original model, still, then perhaps their
Internet versions are being spared whatever carnage is occurring
in the US now, as the commercial dotcom world implodes?
The funding and administrative models also are very different,
comparing the US to France and other foreigners -- perhaps as
different as are the various attitudes toward commercial
applications and toward commercial activity generally. The
funding sources and bureaucracy level provided to a US startup
are barely imaginable, are even nightmarish, to a French
capitalist or a Chinese entrepreneur. The idea of private "angel"
investor groups is as hard to fathom, to an investor in Shanghai,
as the idea of getting venture capital money from the slush fund
at the local army base might be to a consortium in Cupertino.
So perhaps some aspects of the non - US Internet are not being
changed, so radically, by the dotcom troubles which currently are
rocking the Internet in the US itself. Non - commercial
applications, funding and administration: these and other aspects
of the Internet's growth and development may be insulated,
somewhat, from the current free market machinations of the US
commercial services by things being "different" overseas.
Still, though, the Internet, simply by virtue of its being
interconnected and "global" and therefore globally -
interdependent, is that much _less_ insulated from local US
events than any sort of homegrown national system such as the
French Minitel might be. Network effects and externalities tie
the Internet in China to events in Cupertino, and Wall Street, as
the Minitel might not be so tied: in global interconnectedness as
in investing, "what is leveraged up", perhaps to escape national
boundaries, "also is leveraged down", when it might want to hide
behind those same national boundaries for protection.
And still, as well, a great deal of the innovation which has
contributed so much to the development of the Internet has come
from its commercial sector. The saying is, in "Research &
Development", that "private corporations never do 'R', they only
do 'D'". But there has been much "D" in taking the academic
testbed Internet of 1992 from its 700+ thousand hosts, back then,
to its 100+ million hosts today.
Smug researchers may claim that the commercial world's Internet
currently in use is drastically outmoded, from a technical point
of view: too slow, too crowded, still using simplistic and now
antiquated techniques like "HTML" and "ASCII" when much better
has long been available -- XML, VRML, Unicode, Internet II (aka
"son of Internet" aka "Grendl"), all the way to the "petaflops of
HTMT / Hybrid Technology Multi - Threaded Architecture
hypercomputers" which inter alia just link together the excess
capacities of all of the computers on the Internet, everywhere,
to form one giant parallel processing machine (see this month's
Scientific American, July 2001)...
But while the current commercial Internet may not be as "deep",
yet, as some of its academic and other research developers would
like it to be, it certainly is far more "broad", already, than
any of them ever dreamed it might one day become: more hosts,
more users, more applications, more network effects and
externalities, more financial and political and cultural clout,
now everywhere on the planet.
This breadth has been due to the uncontrolled, uncontrollable,
and chaotic and wasteful and democratic / oligopolistic /
monopolistic (somehow and ironically all three at once) and
mostly US - based commercial US Internet -- the one that spread
HTML and the "personal" computer all over, the one which created
"lowest common denominator" applications like Yahoo! and
WebLouvre and AOL and "Infotainment", the one which engendered
the dotcom bubble, which just has burst.
If the bubble really has popped, will all that innovation now
simply go away?: not the "R / Research" innovation, which
invented the technical aspects of the Internet, but the "D /
Development" innovation which marketed it and spread it all over
the globe, made it cost effective and a household word, and
endowed it with its enormous financial and political and cultural
power?
More realistically, perhaps, how is that "D / Development"
innovation going to change, now, if and to the extent that it no
longer will be in the hands of venture capital - funded "dotcom"
startup cowboys -- average age 23, baseball - cap - on -
backwards, swimming in Jolt Cola and video games, experienced at
nothing and afraid of less?
If Internet "D / Development" is being transferred, now, as many
in the US financial community increasingly believe, from those
quirky pioneers to mainstream American industry -- to Disney and
3M and Exxon and Enron and Wal-Mart and General Motors, instead
of Yahoo! -- won't this make some considerable difference in the
direction of Internet "D / Development", going forward?
It appears that it will in the US, at least: we are headed here
towards "Infotainment", with a vengeance, at least dwarfing if
not entirely obliterating all the rest.
But how will this play out overseas, where the commercial
presence in online digital information has been, until now at
least, arguably less strong?
In France, the national government has led the way. National
policies and money, nationalized firms, and nationally -
supported universities and libraries, have been the primary
instruments of the development of Internet "breadth" -- the "D /
Development" aspect of the Internet's growth -- at least in
enabling and controlling and channeling its explosive increases,
insofar as that growth, like the "depth" technical processes
themselves, in largest part came flooding into France "over the
wires" from Cupertino.
This has been largely the model elsewhere as well, overseas: in
Singapore, in China, in Vietnam and Germany and various other
places where the non - US Internet has been growing so wildly --
for various reasons in each locality, government rather than the
commercial sector has been the primary facilitator of that
growth.
So now, if the US growth engine does change fundamentally -- from
those inexperienced 20 - something "Yahoos" backed by little
groups of venture capital "cowboys", to some of the most
entrenched and powerful economic players on the planet -- from
KleinerPerkins to Citigroup, which now is at $68b annual revenues
and is one of the world's largest MoneyCenter banks -- how are
the overseas Internet developers going to handle _that_?
I don't know, myself -- I wish I did -- although I am beginning
to have some guesses. I _do_ know for sure that US corporate
culture has been driving Internet "D / Development" innovation,
and that this culture will be very different if it really
transfers, now, from its "New Economy / Jerry & David & Yahoo!"
approach to its "Old Economy / Sandy Weill's Citigroup"
incarnation. Michael Eisner at Disney just does not do things the
way "Webvan" did. And the successful hybrids of "New Economy" and
"Old Economy", such as AOL Time Warner (imagine, CNN Global now
is "an AOL company"!) -- well, these successful meldings are rare
exceptions, as are the few entirely "New Economy" business models
which so far appear to be succeeding, such as Amazon and EBay.
So it looks like the Good Old Boys are back: Disney, and IBM, and
3M, and the oil companies and the drug companies and the banks...
_new_ "Captains and Kings", alors... or maybe these are just The
Old Gods, resurgent, the ones who used to eat their children...
Internet globalization ain't seen nothin' yet... the foreigners,
and the rest of us, may not know how easy we've been having it...
But have a nice summer anyway -- in spite of / because of various
new things to ponder -- until the rentre'e --
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.sf.ca.us
* Note: Choose your favorite Internet "metric" -- there are so
many -- even those of Network Wizards, shown here, are subject to
endless qualifications as to survey method, definitions,
interpretations, etc. (all best supplied by Network Wizards
themselves, URL above, or by their many admirers and critics).
I myself have found the Network Wizards figures to be among the
most reliable, at least because of that firm's longevity. In an
increasingly - commercial "information space", increasingly
populated with exaggerated claims for "household penetration" and
"number of users" and "pageviews" and so on, it is reassuring to
be able rely on consistent and long - standing good work. Network
Wizards' first survey, conducted in August of 1981, nostalgically
recites "213" total hosts: that was _all_ of the Internet, back
then, in the whole world...
n.b. a "host", for Network Wizards, is,
"a domain name that has an IP address (A) record
associated with it. This would be any computer system
connected to the Internet (via full or part-time, direct
or dialup connections). ie. nw.com, www.nw.com".
-- and nevermind that numbers of Ouebbesites "in France" now call
themselves ".com" -- in The Matrix, all borders are only Virtual
-- or that plenty of ".edu" sites are dirtying their digits now
in the commercial world, or that soon we are to have the even
more misleading and even less statistically - informative ".love"
and ".hola" and ".gmbh" and ".xxx"...
The statistics are presented here for comparative purposes only
-- for comparing France to France, current versus past
performance, and France to its most similar neighbors -- and not
for any attempt to quantify the (still) unquantifiable Internet.
--oOo--
FYI France (sm)(tm) e-journal ISSN 1071 - 5916
*
| FYI France (sm)(tm) is a monthly electronic
| journal published since 1992 as a small-scale,
| personal experiment, in the creation of large-
| scale "information overload", by Jack Kessler.
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--hjlm--
