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The Web Foundation will seek to foster collaboration among business leaders, technologists, government, academia, and nongovernmental organizations. The mission is to:







• advance One Web that is free and open
  
• expand the Web's capability and robustness
  
• extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet
  

“We’re probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder,” said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in collecting intelligence via the Internet. “We’ve given terrorists a free ride in cyberspace,” he said.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”

Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers.

Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese “are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don’t have to route through the U.S.”

Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, “We discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t keep it a secret.” While the United States carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent.

Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.

ANYTHING that keeps tykes pacified on long car trips, like video systems in rear seats, is a boon to automotive safety. Today, Chrysler is poised to offer in its 2009 models a new entertainment option for the children: Wi-Fi and Internet connectivity. The problem is that the entire car becomes a hotspot. The signals won’t be confined to the Nintendos in the rear seat; front-seat occupants will be able to stay online, too.

Tom Vanderbilt, the author of “Traffic,” a best-selling book about our driving habits, said last week: “We’ve already seen fatalities from people looking at their laptops while driving. It seems absolutely surprising that Chrysler would open the door for a full-blown distraction like Internet access.”

On Chrysler’s Web site, Keefe Leung, a manager in the company’s advanced connectivity technology group, explains the rationale for the service: “People are connected in their lives everywhere today. They’re connected at home, they’re connected at the office, they’re connected at Starbucks when they go for a cup of coffee.” But, he says, “the one place that they spend a lot of time that they’re not connected is in their vehicle, and we want to bring that to them.”

もし全知全能の計画当局が永遠の未来を合理的に予想し、世界を正しく導くことができるとすれば、自由は必要ない。この仮定は荒唐無稽にみえるかもしれないが、現代の「合理的期待理論」と呼ばれるマクロ経済学では、明示的にそう仮定するのである。この学派のリーダーであるトマス・サージェントは、あるインタビューで「典型的な合理的期待モデルは、一種の共産主義です。このモデルでは、すべての人々は計量経済学者であり、神と同じモデルを共有しているのです」と語っている。
　

パレートやワルラスが社会主義者だったことからもわかるように、新古典派経済学は計画経済の理論なのである。ここでは現実を単純な数学モデルに還元するために、市場経済のもっとも重要な「不完全な知識でも動く」という特長が捨象されている。自由に価値があるのは、新古典派経済学のいうように、それによって「効率的な資源配分」が実現するからではない。人々が神ではない以上、合理的な社会的意思決定を行なうことは不可能だからである。
　

インターネットをつくったデヴィッド・クラークの「われわれは王も大統領も投票も拒否する。信じるのはラフな合意と動くコードだ」という有名な言葉は、インターネットの「ベスト・エフォート」（最善の努力はするが責任はもたない）の思想をよく表わしている。それは不完全な知識しかないユーザーでもそれなりに動くし、問題があれば後から直すという「進化的」な発想でできている。
　

Industry sources tell us that although Android will indeed start as a mobile OS, Google intends to expand it to be a sort of universal operating system that will span set-top boxes for televisions, mp3 players and other communication and media devices and services.

If what Eldon is hearing is true, that means that Android could one day spread beyond mobile phones and set-top boxes to a multiplicity of devices. After all, if we are moving towards an Internet of things, those things will need an operating system. In this case, however, the operating system will reside partially in the cloud, and applications written on Google’s App Engine, for instance, will work across devices and the Web.

There are more than three billion mobiles in use today and more than 80 per cent of the world's population live within range of a network. In areas where wireline or WiFi access barely exists, many new users will first experience the internet through a mobile phone. In developing economies, people are already finding innovative ways to use mobile technology. Grameen's micro-finance and village phone programmes in Bangladesh and elsewhere are known and respected around the world, but there are many less famous examples. During the Kenyan elections, Mobile Planet provided its subscribers with up-to-the-minute results by text message. As the cost of mobile technologies fall, the opportunities for such innovation will continue to grow.

The technology isn't perfect yet, but it's rapidly improving. Even in its present form, it's easy to imagine a not-too-distant future in which automatic translation will allow two people in the world to message one another in real time, each experiencing the chat in his or her tongue. Just imagine what a significant step that will be.

It might sound very Noah's Ark, but this is not a joke: $12 million in government funding, as well as bandwidth from two research hubs, has been awarded to the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), a project from BBN Technologies that literally wants to rebuild the whole Internet.

　「インターネットは、失敗するコストを下げた」（伊藤氏）

　1つは米国の著名バンド「Nine Inch Nails」のアルバム「Ghosts I-IV」だ。36曲のうち9曲を無料で公開し、36曲すべてをダウンロードする場合は5ドル、2枚組CDは10ドル、4枚組みのLPなどを付けた限定版CDは300ドルで販売したところ、2500セット用意した限定版はすぐに売り切れた。Ghosts I-IV公開直後の1週間の売り上げは1億6000万円に達したという。しかも流通業者を間に挟んでいないため、この売り上げのほとんどはアーティストの収入になったとのことだ。

　もう1つはフィンランドの学生らが制作したという映画「Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning」だ。「STAR TREK」のパロディーとして作られたこの映画をインターネット上で無料公開したところ、400万ダウンロードされるほどの人気となった。これを受けてUniversal Picturesがライセンス権を買い、映画をDVD化したほか、テレビ放送や劇場放映もされる事態になったという。

"Students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st-century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university's College of Education and Human Development and lead investigator of the study. "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. ... "The websites offer tremendous educational potential."