Today, we live in the world that is enormously complex and independent.
Hyperconnectivity are complex into dependency for the purposes of this course.
Fundamental redefines the way individuals,
enterprises, and governments interconnect and relate with each other.
It provides new innovation models,
new growth opportunities, any risks to manage and mitigate.
Hyperconnectivity impacts every nation,
every industry and person.
It creates an enormous potential for
smarter and more sustainable society through increased knowledge and efficiency.
However, there are some major risks associated with it.
Digital divide increases inequality in the world.
Accidents, flash crashes, cyber terrorism,
surveillance, all highlight new security dilemma we all collectively face.
Moreover, we all face data overload and at the same time,
information deficit that might lead to suboptimal choices and decisions.
All the multiple technologies influence these developments,
perhaps the most important driver of change is the Internet.
In this segment, we'll look at the evolution of the network,
it's emerging governance, the global trends,
that are driving the evolution of the digital ecosystem,
and solutions that governments, businesses, civil society,
and tech community are developing to address
numerous challenges of this new global reality.
Since the dawn of time,
humans needed to send messages to each other.
The more pressing the need for a secure and fast communication was,
the more elaborate the solutions became.
From smoke signals to post services and telegraphs,
security and economic considerations.
True with the need for fast and resilient communication medium.
It is therefore not surprising,
that the U.S. Department of Defense financed the early experiments of breaking
data into small packets that could be sent efficiently through a decentralized network.
Resiliency and adaptability with a core principles,
that the Internet's forefronters,
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or ARPANET was being built on.
According to some of the pioneers of ARPANET.
It was born out of frustration that many researchers
felt about the costs of scarcity of supercomputers, of the time.
They wanted to give access to the computational power,
to as many scientists as possible without having to build
machines that were often the size or even bigger than this room at that time.
Interestingly enough, similar type of costs and
efficiency considerations led to
the development of cloud computing in the last few years.
ARPANET's region can be traced to the U.S. West Coast in the late 1960s.
By early 70s, the network expanded internationally,
with the first satellite based connection to Norway,
as well as a terrestrial link to the U.K. by
inventing Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Work Protocol.
Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn,
and other pioneers addressed the need for
interoperability and connectivity between various networks,
creating a network of networks,
we know today as Internet.
By 1975, ARPANET was considered to have evolved to operational phase and therefore,
was no longer under ARPA's supervision.
Eventually, when it was decommissioned in 1990,
ARPANET was just one of 40,000 networks that make up the Internet today.
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee,
while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research
crossed the lake here in Geneva,
used hypertext, to create what we now know as World Wide Web.
I would like to mention two more important steps in
the Internet history that allow us to understand better,
many of the discussions that are happening today.
First, is the 1994 decision of Clinton administration to privatize Internet backbone.
Second, the US Federal Communication Commission's decision to classify
Internet service providers as information services, not telecommunication utilities.
Those two national policy decisions,
drew many of the commercial and political battle lines that came to
the forefront of the global debate in the past couple of years.
In 2008, China surpassed
the United States to become the country with the largest online population.
And, this is despite the fact that
Internet penetration in China is about a half of the U.S. rate.
In 2014, English is still Internet's most used language followed by Chinese.
Naturally, the history of the net is much richer than what I have outlined here.
So, I will indicate a couple of sources where you can find more interesting information.
Speed, mobility and collaboration are
the hallmarks of a successful entity in the digital age.
Today, however, cyberspace is becoming another domain for competition between states,
diminishing trust, that have allowed Internet to strive.
We must advance the dialogue on Internet governance and
cooperation to maintain unfragmented physical and digital worlds.
Our increasingly, data driven world relies on constant adapting algorithm
that are increasingly used for predictive and possibly, prescriptive functions.
This may lead to more technocratic governance models than the world has ever seen.
We need to ensure a sustainable, transparent,
fair and lawful data ecosystem before we allow that to happen.
In the next few years,
two more billion individuals will join the Internet of people.
While 50 billion connected devices will serve as a foundation of the Internet of Things.
This will transform the nature of traffic and activity on the Internet.
We might need to redesign the network infrastructure and monetization models,
to meet future traffic demands.
We will also need to rethink interoperability and efficiency that goes
beyond smartphones and creates smart enterprises, cities and nations.
It seems, a day does not pass by without us hearing about
a new high profile data breach of previously unknown cyber vulnerability.
Discussions of cyber risks tends to focus on doomsday scenario or feared cybergeddon,
which is understandable as more and more critical infrastructure becomes cyber dependent.
However, a similar concern perhaps should be opportunity costs,
from loss of trust or fragmentation of the current global digital ecosystem.
This could come as a backlash to a single major event with a gradual erosion of trust.
Already known, cyber security became
an important component of the foreign economic and defense policy-making.
Changing the very nature of interstate relations.
Internet economies in G7 countries are
already bigger than energy and agriculture industries.
Yet, the companies that still mainly come from the developed world,
pay significantly less tax than other industries.
They operate in a global environment with new business and revenue models.
As a result, countries are struggling to support the transition to digital economy,
while sustaining their physical architecture.
Industrial policy in the age of Internet might take a form of data nationalism.
A requirement for certain or all data assets to be stored locally.
That, will lead to fragmentation of the network.
We already see signs of more Federal than unified Internet emerging.
One important thing to note, however,
is that while discussing we're benefits and risks of hyperconnectivity,
large portions of the world's population remain offline.
As of this year, about half of
the world's population does not have regular access to Internet.
In the last couple of years,
we have heard a lot about problems that arise with the use of modern technology.
Particularly Internet, from Snowden to
stolen credit card details and celebrities naked pictures,
we are all bombarded with the information that cyberspace has become a dangerous place.
And more attuned observers, however,
will notice that this is
an exciting time of maturity of the Internet policy-making around the world.
Yet, debates often take diverse focus based on local specificities.
In the developing economies,
they might be about access,
in the emerging markets about competition,
while in the developed world about cyber security or net neutrality.
Being global network, the Internet presents
national governments with multiple challenges.
They want to ensure national and public security,
while promoting local enterprises and upholding traditional societal values.
Decisions that traditionally fall under national authority,
might have very international consequences.
All countries are thinking about the ways to continue to reap benefits
of a global network while mitigate is negative consequences,
drawing the direction of the right degree of
national control and international hierarchy.
To rephrase a famous sentence,
"In a network world,
we all need to think locally and act globally."
Gilbert ProbstProfessor, Organization and Management
Sebastian BuckupVisiting professor
Bruce JenksVisiting professor
Stephan MergenthalerVisiting professor
Cassandra QuintanillaTeaching and research assistant
Lea StadtlerResearch Fellow
Claudia Gonzalez RomoVisiting professor
Julian FleetVisiting professor
Tina AmbosAcademic Director of the International Organizations MBA
