The Second Internet and the Next Big Idea

摘要

Once upon a time, many years ago, there was a magical world where people could communicate and share their ideas freely with anyone, in the blink of an eye, anywhere, anytime. This world, which was called the Internet, was a mysterious and exciting place, and could only be entered by those of the priesthood who built and maintained it. But slowly, gradually, others came along and found this place and messed it all up by their very presence. The Internet gurus decided they needed another sacred place, so they got great gobs of money and built Internet2, reserved solely for themselves, where no one else could play. That's not quite the way it went, but you could be forgiven for thinking so. Internet2 was introduced with great fanfare in 1998 as the massive networking pipeline for science and research, ultimately to benefit us all, and then not much morewas heard of it, at least not popularly.