Doug is currently on leave from his post at the University of Michigan as a professor in the School of Information. Prior to that, he was dean for academic outreach and vice provost for information technology at the University. He has played over the years a major role in developing the Internet environment in the United States. He was, for example, chairman of the board of MERIT, which is the Michigan statewide computing network, and it was MERIT in partnership with IBM and MCI and the Michigan Strategic Fund, which was responsible for the development and operation and management of NSFNet, which was the national backbone network.
Doug received his undergraduate degree from Iowa State and his Ph.D. in government from Indiana University. Those of us who live in Ann Arbor have learned to avoid the Burns Park area when Doug is careening around town on his bike. Doug Van Houweling.

Doug Van Houweling: Thank you very much. I'm delighted to have this chance to talk with so many of you that I already know and to meet so many of you that I'm sure will add immensely to my understanding, over the coming time of this symposium.

It seems to me that this is an extraordinary subject. I at least was taken by the fact that starting on Wednesday, the Michigan of the East launched a symposium on the Internet. And in fact, some of the participants in that symposium will join us tomorrow at the Harvard of the West for this symposium on a similar subject.

What I want to do today is to provide you with a few notions about the Internet and the way that I see it moving forward to develop the world in which we live. I'd like to talk first of about history and background, say a few words about the Internet as we know it today, mention some applications that I think are important indicators for the future, talk about the fact that I think the use of the Internet will shift in a fundamental fashion, and a little bit about the technology, and finally some of the implications of all that.

Vint has already done an extraordinary job of talking about how we got to where we are. I won't take a lot of time to add to that, except to say that the part of this crazy world that I'm currently responsible for is, as Phil told you, the Internet2 project, which is a project of 125 research universities across the country working together with 30 corporate members to explore the future of this network. And it's all based on the notion that we can build a network in our environment, in the higher education environment, based on the research that's been done in our environment, that eventually reaches out and provides service to the rest of the world. We've done it already with the inventions that Vint talked about, NSFNet. We're about to start this spiral again where we move from research and development, through partnerships with industry, until the capabilities become part of the private market and become commercialized.

The goals of the Internet2 project are to enable a new generation of applications and to re-create the network capability to support those. Then, perhaps most importantly, to transfer those capabilities into the global production Internet.

Why are we focused on turning around this spiral one more time? The fact is that the Internet, depending on whose estimate you trust, continues to grow at 10 to 20 percent per month, and the challenges to universities and colleges across the world are that we have ambitions for this network that simply won't tolerate what has become known as the World Wide Wait, although I mentioned in a news conference we had just before this talk that I think that the folks that are building today's Internet have been doing an extraordinary job of coping with this growth. I think the Internet has performed steadily better over the last nine months.

But even so, using this network to support human interaction, as Vint pointed out, is awkward. We can't really have a virtual seminar. It's difficult for authors to get together and talk to one another from different locations, to author papers. And actually, even the business of turning pages quickly when you're leafing through a publication seems to be pretty mundane. It turns out not to work all that well in the network today. And of course the more ambitious applications, where we do models of weather and try to jointly understand the way biological systems operate, are simply not feasible with the Internet today.

But there are specific applications that point to the future built on the VBNS that Vint talked about before that show us the potential. Because not everybody has an implant yet, there are a large number of folks around the world who depend on sign language to communicate. It turns out that you can't teach sign language except through using video, and it has to be good video, because you've actually got to see the movements of the hands in incredible detail. And in fact, using the kinds of capabilities that are part of Internet2, we're able to start teaching sign language at a distance, over the network.

Here at the University of Michigan, we have scholars from all over the world using a very expensive instrument, the Electronic Scanning Microscope. But perhaps more importantly, we're now letting people who would not ordinarily even have access to this instrument begin to use it in times when it would otherwise not be used. And the notion of being able to actually manipulate this microscope from a distance, see the images, and store those images digitally turns out to be an enormously important tool, both for learning about how these instruments work and for collaboration.

As Vint pointed out, we know more and more about how the brain works. That has come to a large extent from the fact that we are now able, using modern non-invasive medical technology combined with extraordinary amounts of computing power, to see the brain in action. So we can actually see how the brain reacts to a particular image. It's of course that work that will ultimately allow the retinal implant that we were just talking about. Trying to understand, really, how the neural pathways work.

The fact is that we can't undertake those activities in one place. We have to make those capabilities available to researchers all over, and using this Internet of the future, we can do that.

You'll hear a lot about the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory, and I won't say more about that. But I will say something about the general capability to bring people together in virtual environments for meetings. We have facilities called "caves," which are rooms that create a virtual reality. The problem is, until now, if you want to share that virtual reality with someone, they have to come to the same place you are. But using tele-immersion capabilities, we expect that people who are separated by hundreds and thousands of miles will be able to work in the same virtual reality so that two drug designers will be able to manipulate molecules from their separate laboratories on different parts of the planet. And we have portable implementations of that technology as well.

In fact, it's interesting that one of the most exciting medical-education applications is an application that helps physicians and surgeons working on the ear to understand how that very complicated neurological infrastructure works, using virtual reality techniques.

Well, is there a trend here, in the direction of these applications? I believe there is. I'll be as bold as to say that I think that today's Internet, the way most of us use it, focuses on access to and delivery of information. I think the Internet we're talking about for the future will of course continue to support an information-rich environment, but perhaps most importantly it will support human collaboration in that environment. That we'll find increasingly that this a tool that allows us to work together and - as Vint pointed out, the electronic games - to play together in our future.

In order to do that, we're going to have to have new capabilities in the network. In fact, much of what we're doing in Internet2 is to try to examine the applications and understand how we have to engineer the network. And of course, once we understand that, then we can do more with the applications, and this turns out to be a positive feedback loop.

We're moving, really, here from a technology where the Internet might be characterized today as a single-lane road - where everybody can do a curb cut, and everybody's automobile can run, has to run, one by one behind the other through the network - to a multi-lane superhighway, where we have special-purpose lanes for special activities that require rapid interaction or the transmission of a movie or the transportation of a very large amount of data for a research project, that will need access control. If a lane gets overcrowded, we need to be able to turn the red light on and say, "Not now. You need to wait until later, because we don't have enough capacity on our lane right now to make your application work reliably." And, of course, what that means is that, where appropriate, we'll need toll lanes, so that the infrastructure and the capabilities can be paid for.

That will allow us to guarantee to an application that from one end of this network to another the network will perform as needed. And it will allow us to broadcast on the network.

I imagine some of you are hockey fans, and it's pretty easy to see the finals for the Stanley Cup on television. An awful lot of Michigan fans around the world would have very much liked to have seen the finals of the college hockey tournament. They could hear it on the Internet, but they couldn't see it yet.

And of course, we need to know who we're talking to and our conversations have to be secure. That, of course, requires us to have very fast circuits. MCI has helped us out immensely with that, with their very high performance backbone network system, and we've recently announced a new effort called Abilene, which is moving to even higher speeds, where we're now going to be able to move up a billion characters in one second across this network. We just announced Abilene on the 14th of April. (He refers to a picture on the screen behind him.) You notice Vint standing right to the side of the vice president (Al Gore) there at that announcement.

Now, what does this mean in the larger context of where we're headed in the world? I'd like to point to some trends here. The first is a trend - and I owe this insight really to Charles Goldfinger, a European economist - to the notion that the world is moving increasingly to what I call intangible value. I think most of us today think of value in the world as being based on tangibles, on physical flows of material goods and products. But if you look at the economic statistics across the last two decades, you see a steadily accelerating trend, which says that the growth in the transportation of physical goods is slowing, and there's much faster growth in the transportation of more ethereal streams of data, images and symbols.
Much of the value in the world today is conveyed through electronic capabilities, from one place and another, without a flow of physical goods. And furthermore, that intangible value is increasingly supporting human interaction that is less constrained by geography and time than it has been in the past.

What that's lead to is an increasingly large number of distributed organizations. In particular - although I doubt that very many of you know, and I didn't know it either, until Eva Wilson told me about it the other day, and I read a thesis by Emily Bruner from MIT - VISA International is a distributed organization. It's very hard to say who is in charge of the Visa card, because in fact all of the banks that provide that service are in charge. I always get asked, "Who's in charge of the Internet?" And I always respond, "No one."

I'd like to point out that there's another organizational form that all of us are familiar with, to which I think the Marshall Scholarship really owes its ability to exist, that higher education is another distributed organization. The fact is that although there is no one in charge of the international higher education system, it's still possible to mount programs which bring people together from two continents.

It's interesting, isn't it, that the Internet was discovered, developed and first scaled in the higher education environment? My hypothesis in fact is that it couldn't have happened anywhere else. Only universities understand that truly wonderful things can happen even when there's no one in charge.

And now the world is discovering that organizations that distribute authority and put choices close to the bottom of the organization have extraordinary vitality and capability to generate value. In fact these distributed organizations are all created to convey intangible value. There's no set of values a whole lot more intangible than what we do in higher education, and interestingly enough they're all dependent on flows of information and very flexible interorganizational, interpersonal relationships.

So what are the implications of these trends for the Internet world? I need to make it clear that the future will undoubtedly be different than we can predict, but we can, I think here, observe a powerful confluence. First, that intangible value represented in and transportable through information technology, is becoming an increasingly fundamental element of the way our world works, that there are increasing numbers of good models for successful distributed global organizations, and that the Internet is designed, really, to support a world that's built on human collaboration in an information-rich environment.

As we look towards that future, I think we can expect that the kinds of organizations that our children will spend their lives creating and sustaining, and the kind of value that they will focus their energies on will have more to do with the kinds of things that we, as human beings, find sustaining for our souls.

President Bollinger talked about the word. We have scholars today across the world that have said we have a new representation of text in this world we're talking about, but nonetheless it's an ability to convey meaning, create emotional linkages through communication and work among human beings. I believe this future is a future that's enabled by this network and by the way that all of us are responding to its capabilities. Thank you very much.