Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Dr Roberts prescribes a cure: Equal pay, equal access, says Lawrence Roberts. Picture courtesy: www.packet.cc

Dr Lawrence Roberts told a World Hi-Tech Forum event that some people were getting greater capacity without having to pay a penny more than anyone else.

Dr Roberts, who designed internet forerunner ARPANET in 1967, said Peer-to-Peer (P2P) multiflow applications that can overload the web were the culprit.

He said 5 per cent of users congested the network by taking up 80 per cent of its capacity.

“If the network assures that all similar users get equal service, file sharing will find the best equitable method – perhaps slack time and local hosts,” he says.

The trouble is that P2P networks don’t know the boundaries of ‘fairness’, nor do users realise that by using P2P applications they could be slowing down and stalling others on the network, which Dr Roberts says  leads to “globally uneconomic product decisions.”

He argued that the technical policy from the early days of ARPANET of ‘Equal capacity per flow’ had to now become one of ‘equal capacity per user’, considering that the flows of data across the internet were now managed by computers and not human beings.

Dr Roberts also called for more to be done to make the network more secure.

When ARPANET first started there were no checks, for example, on the source of data from and to particular machines or about their users.

He said the same applied today – so improved security was essential for any internet user and user confidence. This required the ability to check who you were connected to.

Dr Roberts, who was honoured for his pioneering work with ARPANET and its role in helping to create the www we know today, said companies were increasingly reliant on the internet for promotion and selling products.

He believes that 99 per cent of people will be online by 2018, compared to 22 per cent of the global population now and that everyone will possess a mobile device which will be secure, hold our personal information, allow us to make payments, work as a GPS and universal remote control.

• A report by Reuters suggests that e-commerce sales will equate to £59.8bn this year - a 28 per cent increase over sales in 2007.