Fast Company interviews @InternetSociety’s Lynn St. Amour on future of #Internet #INETny

Lynn St AmourOn May 26 2011 Fast Company, as part of their futurist Crystal Ballin’ series, published an interview with Internet Society President Lynn St. Amour Envisioning The Omnipresent, Benevolent Internet Of The Future. Rather than “series of tubes” St Amour sees the Internet as a “series of building blocks”..

Some have suggested in the past that the Internet just wasn’t built to handle the vast structures it supports today, and that for security reasons, we ought to just scrap it and start over. Do you think that’ll ever happen?

I think any notion that scraps the Internet and starts from a clean slate is just a non-starter; we won’t be scrapping this Internet for many, many decades. That’s not to say there won’t be other Internets or other structures that both build on and evolve from this one. The Internet is basically a series of building blocks that allow future Internets and future applications. Cybersecurity often does mean a hardening down or locking out, under the guise of protection, but our advice is really to lean in to the real core of what’s made the Internet the Internet–its openness, its resiliency.

Lynn St Amour will, of course, be moderating the closing Cerf/Berners Lee/Strickling discussion at INET New York on June 14.