[p2p-research] is the internet going down the drain in 12-18 months?

[Michel Bauwens]

This would deserve a discussion,

Sepp? Olivier? Matt?

Gordon Cook says this should scare us:


http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/apr/01/six-easy-steps-avert-collapse-civilization/

• 2 months, 2 weeks ago
For someone who has worked fulltime-plus for many years to advance the cause
of sustainable Internet development, it was gratifying -- but also a bit
troubling -- to hear David Eagleman's suggestion that the Internet
represents our best hope for averting a civilizational collapse. At the
moment, the Internet itself is on the cusp of a major evolutionary
inflection point, after which most of the seemingly highest probability
future development trajectories lead to states that would probably not
satisfy Eagleman's expectations, or even live up to the expectations of
today's non-casual Internet participant-contributors.
*That inflection point will arrive in appx. 12-18 months, when the last
remaining reserves of unallocated IPv4 addresses will be depleted. To date,
these protocol number resources have served as the fundamental logical
"glue" holding the Internet together, and enabling the 35k or so
independently administered Internet networks to seamlessly interact and
exchange traffic with one another*. Unfortunately, The designated successor
address resource, called IPv6, is not backward compatible with the IPv4
addressing standard, which means that future aspiring network operators that
only have access to IPv6 will be perpetually isolated and unreachable from
the rest of the Internet -- unless they can somehow secure access to IPv4
themselves (e.g., by buying or leasing it from an "incumbent" IPv4 holder,
or by relying on an incumbent IPv4-based network to serve as a permanent
middleman/broker for all interactions with the rest of the built Internet).
Today, despite the looming inevitability of IPv4 exhaustion, only about 5%
of existing Internet networks globally are even capable of providing such a
service.
>From an economic standpoint, many of the causes behind this particular form
of aggregate adaptation to the looming change could be usefully compared to
the conditions leading up to (and that might have been anticipated by
interested parties beforehand) the Enclosures. I don't know enough about
neurological systems to suggest a relevant comparison by name, but I have no
doubt that Dr. Eagleman and others could fill in that particular blank. How
would one characterize a distributed processing system in which established
system-wide, mesh-like interactions are gradually canalized/partitioned into
and superceded by less flexible/variable, more linear/serial, and more
narrowly scoped interactions? How would one diagnose a learning system in
which the possibility for (and any memory of) future learning is absolutely
contingent on the active support of dominant subsystems that came to achieve
that status as a result of past learning?
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