Internet Architecture and Innovation

This book examines the architecture of the Internet and how it affects the economic environment for innovation. Throughout her book, van Schewick refers to the original design principles of the Internet that shaped its architecture, and the tendency of network providers to deviate from these principles because of technical and economic reasons. These deviations can negatively impact the design and development of innovations for future utilisation of the Internet. This makes it much more difficult to change certain parts of the Internet’s architecture, consequently hampering the quality of application innovation at significant costs to society. We first provide an overview of each chapter and then present a number of critical comments, in particular on how the book relates to standardization research. Chapter 1 introduces a theoretical framework of how architectures relate to economic systems and impact innovation. Chapter 2 discusses the (retrospective) end-to-end arguments, which provide direction to positioning functionality in a layered architecture and explains the reasons for moving application-specific functionality upwards in those layers. The author argues there is no single end-to-end principle but in fact there are two: a narrow and a broad version that are different in scope, content and validity. Only the broad version affects the economic environment for innovation and is defined as: “A function or service should be carried out within a network layer only if it is needed by all clients of that layer, and it can be completely implemented in that layer”. Chapter 3 describes how the original design principles (modularity, layering and these end-to-end arguments) shaped the initial architecture of the Internet. Modularity allows for an independent and loosely coupled component design, but imposes restrictions on overall performance. Integrated designs, with tightly coupled components in several architecInternet Architecture and Innovation