News Story

Future Internet: Defining a new Internet for Europe for 2020

John Domingue, Wednesday 2 Apr 2008

With over a billion users world-wide, the current Internet is a great success – a global integrated communications infrastructure and service platform underpinning the fabric of the World economy and society in general. However, today’s Internet was designed in the 1970s for purposes that bear little resemblance to current and foreseen usage scenarios. Mismatches between original design goals and current utilisation are now beginning to hamper the Internet�s potential. A large number of challenges in the realms of technology, business, society and governance have to be overcome if the future development of the Internet is to sustain the networked society of tomorrow. In order to address the above problem from a European perspective a new programme was launched this week in Bled – the Future Internet initiative. Beginning with webcasts from Commissioners Viviane Reding and dr. Janez Potocnik the first day continued with a number of very high profile speakers including Prof. dr. Ziga Turk, Slovenian Minister of Growth who stated that the introduction of the Internet in the area was a key factor in the emergence of Slovenia as a sovereign state, and Mr. Davor Sostaric from the Slovenian Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology, Information Society Directorate. The rest of the first day included keynotes from the Chief Technology and Science Officers and Vice-Presidents of SAP, BT, Alcatel-Lucent, IBM, Thomson, and Ericsson. The climax of the first day was the signing of the �Bled Declaration� a statement of intent to contribute to the Future Internet from 70 European projects with a combined value of over 500M Euros. On the second and third day of the conference the leaders of the 70 projects discussed the Future Internet within five working groups in the areas of Networks, Services, Security, Content and Experimental Facilities (infrastructures to support Internet experiments). KMi is heavily involved in the Future Internet through participation and leadership within the Service Web 3.0 and SOA4All projects, editing the final versions of the Bled Declaration, co-Chairing the Services working group, and Chairing the new Future Internet Symposium to be held in Vienna at the end of September.