The document summarizes a study on the factors contributing to the Internet's technical success. It identifies four key dimensions of the Internet's success: scalability, flexibility, adaptability, and resilience. These success factors stem from the Internet's original guiding ideals of openness, simplicity, and decentralization, which led to its fundamental design principles of layering, a network of networks, and the end-to-end principle. The design principles have allowed the Internet to scale exponentially to growing users and usage, accommodate diverse underlying networks and technologies, support new applications, and remain resilient to changes over time.

1. Study on the Internet’s technical
success factors
PITA Business Forum & Expo 2022
Pablo Hinojosa, Michael Kende, Amund Kvalbein
26 May 2022

2. ▪ The Internet has successfully scaled to the increased demand
from new users and usage,
▪ It has been flexible to new network technologies,
▪ It has adapted to new applications,
▪ And the whole has been resilient to shocks and changes.
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We identified four dimensions to the Internet’s success
The Internet
Scalable
Growth in usage
Adaptable
Flexible
Resilient
Applications
Networks
Scalable
Growth in users

3. ▪ The early development of the Internet was based on openness, simplicity, and decentralization.
▪ Three well-known design principles that sprung out of the guiding ideals have been central to the Internet’s development and are useful
concepts to understand the dimensions of success
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Guiding ideals and design principles

4. ▪ Three well-known design principles that sprung out of the guiding ideals have been central to the Internet’s development and are useful
concepts to understand the dimensions of success: layering, network of networks and end-to-end.
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The Internet is shaped by three design principles

5. ▪ The Internet is scalable in its technical
architecture, operational and business
models, which has enabled it to grow quickly
and with few imposed constraints
▪ The underlying technical design principles,
particularly layering and network-of-
networks, have enabled growth in the
geographic reach of the Internet, while also
scaling so that speeds are improving over
time. This has allowed introduction of new
networks that give increased capacity, while
at the same time the routing system has
scaled well to the increased number of
networks
Internet users by RIR region, overlaid with global population [Source: ITU, World Bank,
2021]
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Scalability: exponential growth in users and usage

6. ▪ The Internet is flexible to different types of
underlying networks ranging from high-
speed optical networks to ad-hoc wireless
networks, each of them suited to different
user requirements, geographies and socio-
economic characteristics of countries,
regions and people
▪ The flexibility of the Internet to
accommodate new network technologies
starts from the layering principle, which
separates the end-to-end routing of IP traffic
from the underlying network technologies.
▪ The network of networks principle allows
networks to be developed and run
independently and with different network
technologies
Number of Internet subscriptions by access connections, Australia [Source: Australian
Bureau of Statistics, 2021]
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Flexibility: underlying network technologies

7. ▪ The Internet is adaptable in that it keeps supporting new applications that are continually emerging, including services historically
provided by dedicated networks (converged communications and broadcast services) as well as newly digitised and networked services
such as online banking, remote health, and ride sharing.
▪ Layering and the end-to-end principle are central to supporting a wide range of applications.
Percentage of websites using HTTPS [Source: W3Techs, 2021] Percentage of websites using QUIC [Source: W3Techs, 2021]
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Adaptability: new applications and use cases

8. ▪ The Internet has proven to be resilient over
time in the face of noteworthy internal
changes and external challenges.
▪ The resilience of the Internet stems both
from fundamental technical properties such
as the simple and distributed nature of
Internet routing protocols, and from
operational practices and methods that have
been developed over time by network
operators. Resilience also encompasses
some measures that violate the technical
design principles in response to challenges,
without fundamentally altering the nature of
the Internet.
Average international traffic by RIR region, as of mid-year [Source: Telegeography, 2021]
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Resilience: to changes in traffic and use patterns

9. ▪ The Internet faces a number of real or perceived technical challenges
to its continued success
▪ Many of these are addressed through incremental changes and new
protocols that are (slowly) adopted
▪ Sometimes more radical proposals are made for completely new
network architectures
▪ It is important to look at what has driven Internet’s success, and be
careful with changes that break with the guiding ideals (and design
principles)
▪ A fundamental change to the Internet is difficult in practice and may
have unwanted side-effects
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Future outlook: evolve to meet changing demands
Technical challenges to the
Internet
Security of the Internet
architecture
Quality of Service
Delays in adopting new
protocols

10. 10
Governments and large Internet companies will play important roles
Governments
As the importance of
the Internet grows,
governments will
inevitably try to gain
some level of control
Internet giants
Content providers play
an increasing role in
both physical network
and protocol
development
The roles of the guiding ideals and design principles for the success of the Internet should be recognized

11. https://www.apnic.net/internetstudy
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