We live in an exciting world. One that is changing dramatically every day. YouTube, Second Life, MySpace, iPhone. You probably hadn’t even heard of these a year ago, but today they dominate the discussion about societal trends and the future of communications and the Internet. Once upon a time, e-commerce drove the Internet debate, but now it’s clear we have entered a new era and you can feel the Internet changing daily.

Today, consumers have ushered in the “Any Era” demanding access to any information, from any device, any time and anywhere they want it. And they not only want access; they want the ability to contribute, personalize and socialize. Consumer generated websites such as Facebook, Wikipedia and Flickr have elbowed out many traditional companies to rank in the top 20 websites in the country. These increasingly popular social-networking sites are accounting for such huge volumes of domain name system (DNS) queries and bandwidth consumption that carriers and corporations are scrambling to keep pace.

From the early days of basic Internet access and web sites to the adolescent years of e-commerce and e-business to the high school years of Web 2.0, ubiquitous instant messaging, voice over IP, smart phones, RFID and broadband video delivery. It’s thrilling to consider the myriad possibilities for the Internet that have not even been thought of yet, but that same exciting unknown also holds equally dangerous pitfalls. Until recently, the Internet has grown largely based on services designed for the IP network, and that organic growth was visible and measurable. Now, with the migration of existing infrastructures such as telephony and TV to Internet Protocol – services that were not originally designed to migrate to the Net – we are seeing explosive, bursty growth.

This volume increase is reflected in the number of queries made of the .com and .net DNS infrastructure every day. In 2000, the .com and .net systems received one billion daily requests for information; today they receive 30 billion requests and rising.
The following data further demonstrates this emerging use and growth of the Internet:

• YouTube consumes as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in year 2000.
  
• Internet-based TV subscribers are expected to reach 100 million by late 2010, up from 3 million in 2006.
  
• There are 15,534,550 SMS transactions every 5 minutes.
  
• Total VoIP subscribers worldwide are projected to grow to over 55 million in 2009 from 16 million in 2005.
  
• The wireless industry is adding 40 million new connections a month, including 6 million in India and 5 million in China.
  
• Wireless gaming revenues will double from 2006 to 2008, to $1.6 billion.
  

These developments reflect what is likely to be the continued meteoric growth of the Internet user population. Morgan Stanley estimated in November 2006 that there will be more than 1.34 billion Internet users worldwide in 2007.

Increasing Threats to the Internet
At the same time, the growth of Internet users, broadband capacity and number of Internet-enabled devices has created an opportunity for hackers, organized criminals and even more serious terrorists to attack our networks through SPAM, spyware, identity theft, viral attacks, and denial of service exploits. Some do so for technical trophies, some for political objectives, but today, most of the attacks on the Internet are done for financial gain. Specifically, the very devices and increased bandwidth that make the Internet more robust and consumer-friendly are now deployed to compromise the Internet. Computers are always-on, so they are easily accessible for hijacking by hackers and other criminals. The increased bandwidth and computing power available literally gives hackers more ammunition to use against the infrastructure. While a Jupiter Research report in 2004 found that the typical home needed less than 3 Mbps of bandwidth, that level has steadily grown and given the demands of gaming and video that capacity is expected to grow to 57 Mbps by 2009. That means that hackers will have 19 times the computing capacity available to them in the PCs they hijack in that period.

Indeed, security exploits have grown by 700% since 2000 and in fact, we expect to see cyber attacks rise 50% in each of the next two years. A series of attacks on the Internet infrastructure in early 2007 reflect how these incidents have grown in frequency and sophistication – some 100 times more threatening than attacks conducted just a few years before.

Given the increased usage and mounting threats, the Internet infrastructure must be continually fortified. An estimated 270 billion queries will occur by the year 2010. That’s more than three million DNS queries every second of every day. There is no credit card, phone, or any other system in the world that handles that volume of transactions.

The growing demand of DNS queries will need to be met by continuously expanding the constellation of geographically-dispersed Internet resolution sites in regions of emerging growth. The distributed infrastructure will need to ensure that the .com and .net systems will have greater redundancy and reduced latency, which will then improve the experience for users by reducing bottlenecks and increasing speed. At the same time, the state of the art engineering enhancements to the system will also create increased capability to track, correlate and pinpoint security and network related events on a global basis, providing even greater security and stability against attacks.

Keeping the Internet Always-On
The Internet is often taken for granted because it works so well. But we are now entering an unprecedented new era of the Internet and we can’t take for granted that it will remain always-on, let alone secure, with no effort on our part. Internet users must stay vigilant about cyber attacks. Infrastructure operators must prepare for their worst-case scenarios – and then prepare for even worse. And governments must work more closely with industry to ensure that the systems that protect our national security and economic prosperity are truly up to the task.