Internet2: The Path Forward

The research and education (R&E) community that created Internet2 in 1996 was the same community whose innovation laid the foundation for nearly every important Internet technology we use today, including the Internet Protocol (IP), UNIX, the World Wide Web, social networking, videoconferencing, and many others.

What was the motivation for the creation of Internet2? To create an official "agent" of the R&E community, charged with ensuring that it continue to provide the same kind of leadership that drove the development of the Internet and made possible all the innovation that poured out afterward; to permanently remove the limitations of bandwidth from the equation and see what kinds of remarkable, life-changing, society-changing discoveries would happen.

New and significantamp amachallenges have since emerged that are creating a new paradigm for the R&E community. These forces include globalization, the proliferation of large-scale distributed science projects, the rise of for-profit education, the increased importance of lifelong learning, emerging needs for risk management, and, most significantly, the decrease in funding for education while costs continue rising rapidly. In the face of these challenges, how can the community come together and leverage its investment in Internet2 to ensure that the fundamental requirements of R&E remain strong, to again lower the barriers of entry into discovery, and to spread the benefits of those discoveries far and wide?

H. David Lambert, recently named Internet2's president and CEO, will describe how these forces and opportunities are aligning Internet2's vision and mapping its path forward.