Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission Information Society & Media

The Internet is undoubtedly permeating and transforming all aspects of our economies and societies. It is a remarkable catalyst for creativity, collaboration and innovation and more broadly, for the development of our economies and societies. A few examples: in 1998, Google indexed 26 million web-pages, today it indexes 1 trillion; Within only five years, Facebook and MySpace have attracted each more than 100 million users world wide; user-generated content such as YouTube produced more than 73 billion streams in 2008; with around four billion mobile users world wide, the Internet is becoming more and more mobile and capable to support a range of new applications and services that were not foreseen in its original design.

by François Baccelli and Jon Crowcroft

The Internet has become critical to everyday life in domains as diverse as education, health, defence, commerce, travel and entertainment. The Internet was not designed for its current level of usage, and there is a need for simple constructs to allow the network to do better in terms of security, mobility and quality of service, among other things.