The Internet will undergo radical restructuring according to Internet Adolescence, a report by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. The catalyst for this will be the ending of the contract for direct funding of the US National Science Foundation’s NSFnet – the high-speed backbone for the Internet – which will occur on April 30 this year. According to the report this will mean that profit-based Internet service providers with national networks will take over as existing operators disappear. The feeling is that the Science Foundation thinks that the Internet has become self-sufficient and that agency funds will go into a pure research network, reports Forrester. To protect their interests when the backbone funding ceases the large Internet providers like EUNET, PSI and Sprint Corp will make agreements to carry each others traffic, claims Forrester. The result of this would be to put regional Internet providers out of the game. The report also finds that software used will move away from free shareware to commercial products. The author of the report, Jay Batson, says local area network independent software vendors are using Internet popularity to provide an outlet for their applications. Lotus Notes operates just as effectively on the Internet as on a local network and Novell Inc has introduced the Ferret information browser, which dissolves the edge between the local network internetwork and Internet, says Batson. He claims these and Mosaic viewers operating on local network-to-Internet electronic mail gateways, will draw users away from TCP/IP applications such as Usenet news, Telnet and File Transfer Protocol. As for security, commercial solutions will become increasingly available to provide data insulation such as router filtering, hacker-shielded applications software and global virus traps. The report is available from Forrester Research, but the price was not given.
