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Managing Digital Business Infrastructure

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E-Commerce and E-Business

(MIT558 )
CSCSIT, TU

Unit 3: Managing Digital Business Infrastructure

Jagdish Bhatta
Introduction

• Defining an adequate digital technology infrastructure is vital


to all start-ups and existing companies making the
transformation to digital business. The infrastructure and
support of different types of digital platform directly affect
the quality of service experienced by users of the systems in
terms of speed and responsiveness.
• The range of digital services provided also determines the
capability of an organization to compete through
differentiating itself in the marketplace.

Jagdish Bhatta 3
Introduction
• Digital business infrastructure
• It is the architecture of hardware, software, content and data
used to deliver e-business services to employees, customers
and partners.
• Digital business infrastructure refers to the combination of
hardware such as servers and client desktop computers and
mobile devices, the network used to link this hardware and
the software applications used to deliver services to workers
within the business and also to its partners and customers.
• Infrastructure also includes the architecture of the networks,
hardware and software and where it is located. Finally,
infrastructure can also be considered to include the methods
for publishing data and documents accessed through
applications. Jagdish Bhatta 4
Introduction

Jagdish Bhatta 5
Digital business infrastructure components
• A five- layer model of digital business infrastructure

Jagdish Bhatta 6
Digital business infrastructure components
• A five-layer model of digital business infrastructure
• An alternative five- level infrastructure model of as ‘the
information system function chain’:
– Storage/physical: Memory and disk hardware components
(equivalent to Level IV in Figure 3.3 in the previous slide).
– Processing: Computation and logic provided by the processor
(processing occurs at Levels I and II).
– Infrastructure: This refers to the human and external interfaces and
also the network, referred to as ‘extrastructure’. (This is Level III,
although the human or external interfaces are not shown there.)
– Application/content: This is the data processed by the application
into information. (This is Level V.)
– Intelligence: Additional computer- based logic that transforms
information to knowledge (Level I). Each of these elements of
infrastructure presents separate management issues which we will
consider separately. Jagdish Bhatta 7
Introduction to Internet Technology
• The Internet enables communication between millions of
connected computers worldwide, but how does the seamless
transfer of data happen? Requests for information are
transmitted from client computers and mobile devices whose
users request services from server computers that hold
information and host business applications that deliver the
services in response to requests. Thus, the Internet is a large-
scale client–server system.
• The client–server architecture consists of client computers,
such as PCs, sharing resources such as a database stored on
more powerful server computers.

Jagdish Bhatta 8
Introduction to Internet Technology
• Physical and network infrastructure components of the
Internet

Jagdish Bhatta 9
Introduction to Internet Technology
• Physical and network infrastructure components of the
Internet
• How the client computers within homes and businesses are
connected to the Internet via local Internet service providers
(ISPs) which, in turn, are linked to larger ISPs with connection to
the major national and international infrastructure or backbones
which are managed by commercial organizations.
• These high- speed links can be thought of as the motorways on
the ‘information superhighway’, while the links provided from
ISPs to consumers are equivalent to slow country roads.
• Internet service provider (ISP): A provider providing home or
business users with a connection to access the Internet. They
can also host web- based applications.
• Backbones: High- speed communications links used to enable
Jagdish Bhatta
Internet communications across a country and internationally. 10
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Some of the issues that managers introducing new services
need to be aware of, including:
– Domain name selection
– Selection of hosting services, including cloud providers
– Selection of additional SaaS (Soft ware as a Service) platforms.

Jagdish Bhatta 11
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Domain name selection
• Companies typically have many digital services located on
different domains, particularly for companies with different
domains for different countries. The domain name refers to
the address of the web server and is usually selected to be the
same as the name of the company, and the extension will
indicate its type. The extension is commonly known as the
generic top- level domain (gTLD).
• Common gTLDs are:
– .com represents an international or American company such as
www.travelocity.com.
– .org is for not- for- profit organizations (e.g. www.greenpeace.org).
– .mobi introduced in 2006 for sites configured for mobile phones.
– .net is a network provider such as www.demon.net.
Jagdish Bhatta 12
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Domain name selection
• There are also specific country- code top- level domains
(ccTLDs)
– .co.uk represents a company based in the UK such as www.thomascook.co.uk.
– .au, .ca, .de, .es, .fi, .fr, .it, .nl, etc. represent other countries (than the co.uk).
– .edu.np is a Nepal-based university or other higher education institution (e.g.
www.tu.edu.np).
– .org.uk is for a not- for- profit organization` focusing on a single country (e.g.
www. mencap.org.uk).

Jagdish Bhatta 13
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Uniform resource locators (URLs)
• The technical name for web address is uniform (or universal)
resource locator (URL). URLs can be thought of as a standard
method of addressing, similar to postcodes or zipcodes, that
make it straightforward to find the name of a domain or a
document on the domain.
• In larger businesses, particularly those with many sites, it’s
important to develop a URL strategy so that there is a
consistent way of labelling online services and resources. URL
strategy is defined approach to forming URLs, including the
use of capitalization, hyphenation and sub-domains for
different brands and different locations. This has implications
for promoting a website offline through promotional or vanity
URLs, search engine optimisation
Jagdish Bhatta and findability. 14
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Domain name registration
• The process of reserving a unique web address that can be
used to refer to the company website.
• Most companies own several domains, for different product
lines or countries or for specific marketing campaigns.
• Domain name disputes can arise when an individual or
company has registered a domain name which another
company claims they have the right to. This is sometimes
referred to as ‘cybersquatting’.
• Managers or agencies responsible for websites need to check
that domain names are automatically renewed by the hosting
company (as most are today).
Jagdish Bhatta 15
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Managing hardware and systems software infrastructure
• The key management decision is standardization throughout the
organization. Standardization leads to reduced numbers of
contacts for support and maintenance and can reduce purchase
prices through multi-user licenses.
• Systems software choices occur for the client, server and
network.
• On client computers, the decision will be which browser
software to standardize on.
• Standardized plug-ins should be installed across the
organization.
• The systems software for the client will also be decided on; this
will probably be a variant of Microsoft Windows, but open-
source alternatives such as Jagdish
Linux may also be considered.
Bhatta 16
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Managing hardware and systems software infrastructure
• When considering systems software for the server, it should
be remembered that there may be many servers in the global
organization, both for the Internet and intranets. Using
standardized web-server software such as Apache will help
maintenance.

Jagdish Bhatta 17
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Managing digital business applications infrastructure
• Digital business applications infrastructure: Applications that
provide access to services and information inside and beyond
an organization.
• Management of the digital business applications
infrastructure concerns delivering the right applications to all
users of digital business services. The issue involved is one
that has long been a concern of IS managers, namely to
deliver access to integrated applications and data that are
available across the whole company.
• Traditionally businesses have developed applications silos or
islands of information.

Jagdish Bhatta 18
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Managing digital business applications infrastructure
• These silos may develop at three different levels:
– there may be different technology architectures used in
different functional areas,
– there will also be different applications and separate
databases in different areas, and
– processes or activities followed in the different functional
areas may also be different.
• To avoid the problems of a fragmented applications
infrastructure, companies attempted throughout the 1990s to
achieve the more integrated position. Many companies
turned to enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors such as
SAP, Baan, PeopleSoft and Jagdish
Oracle.
Bhatta 19
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Managing digital business applications infrastructure
• ERP applications are software providing integrated functions
for major business functions such as production, distribution,
sales, finance and human resources management.

Jagdish Bhatta 20
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Managing digital business applications infrastructure

Jagdish Bhatta 21
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Managing digital business applications infrastructure

Jagdish Bhatta 22
Management issues in creating a new
customer-facing digital service
• Managing digital business applications infrastructure

Jagdish Bhatta 23
Web services SaaS, cloud computing and
service-oriented architecture (SOA)

• ‘Web services’ or ‘Software as a Service (SaaS)’: refers to a highly


significant model for man aging software and data within the digital
business age. The web services model involves managing and performing
all types of business processes and activities through accessing web-
based services rather than running a traditional executable application on
the processor of your local computer.
• Web services: Business applications and software services are provided
through Internet and web protocols with the application managed on a
separate server from where it is accessed through a web browser on an
end-user’s computer.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Hardware used to provide support for
end-user applications is outsourced and paid for according to level of
usage. The hardware infrastructure used includes servers and networks.

Jagdish Bhatta 24
Web services SaaS, cloud computing and
service-oriented architecture (SOA)

• PaaS (Platform as a Service): Provision of software services for application


design, development, data storage, testing and hosting together with
messaging tools for collaboration on the development project.

Jagdish Bhatta 25
Web services SaaS, cloud computing and
service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Benefits of web services or SaaS
• SaaS are usually paid for on a subscription basis, so can potentially be
switched on and off or payments paid according to usage, hence they are
also known as ‘on demand’. The main business benefit of these systems is
that installation and maintenance costs are effectively outsourced.
• Cost savings are made on both the server and client sides, since the server
software and databases are hosted externally and client applications
software is usually delivered through a web browser or a simple
application that is downloaded via the web.

Jagdish Bhatta 26
Web services SaaS, cloud computing and
service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Application programming interfaces (APIs)
• In the Internet era, the opportunities to add value to the services or share
information via other online companies and their web services to increase
their potential reach is required. For this, they can use API.
• Here are some examples from retail, publishing and software companies
where APIs, sometimes known as the ‘Programmable Web’, have been
used to help gain competitive advantage:
– Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com). One example of AWS allows affiliates,
developers and website publishers to use Amazon Product Discovery which enables
other sites to incorporate data about Amazon products and pricing.
– Facebook and Twitter use their APIs to help other sites embed social content into their
sites.
– The Guardian Newspaper Open Platform (www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform) enables
sharing of content and statistics from The Guardian.
– Google APIs exist for a number of its services, most notably Google Maps .

Jagdish Bhatta 27
Web services SaaS, cloud computing and
service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Challenges of deploying SaaS
• The most obvious disadvantage of using SaaS is dependence on a third
party to deliver services over the web, which has these potential
problems;
– Downtime or poor availability if the network connection or server hosting the
application or server fails.
– Lower performance than a local database. You know from using Gmail or
Hotmail that although responsive, they cannot be as responsive as using a
local email package like Outlook.
– Reduce data security since traditionally data would be backed up locally by in-
house IT staff (ideally also off- site). Since failures in the system are inevitable,
companies using SaaS need to be clear how back-up and restores are
managed and the support that is available for handling problems, which is
defined within the service level agreement (SLA).
– Data protection – since customer data may be stored in a different location it
is essential that it is sufficiently secure and consistent with the data protection
and privacy laws
Jagdish Bhatta 28
Web services SaaS, cloud computing and
service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Cloud computing
• The use of distributed storage and processing on servers
connected by the Internet, typically provided as software or
data storage as a subscription service provided by other
companies.
• The cloud referred to is the combination of networking and
data storage hardware and software hosted externally to a
company, typically shared between many separate or
‘distributed’ servers accessed via the Internet. So, for
example, Google Docs will be stored somewhere ‘in the cloud’
without any knowledge of where it is or how it is managed
since Google stores data on many servers.

Jagdish Bhatta 29
Web services SaaS, cloud computing and
service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Virtualization
• It is the indirect provision of technology services through
another resource (abstraction). Essentially one computer is
using its processing and storage capacity to do the work of
another.
• Virtualization essentially lets one computer do the job of
multiple computers, by sharing the resources of a single
computer across multiple environments. Virtual servers and
virtual desktops let you host multiple operating systems and
multiple applications.

Jagdish Bhatta 30
Web services SaaS, cloud computing and
service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Service Oriented Architecture
• A service-oriented architecture is a collection of services that
communicate with each other as part of a distributed systems
architecture comprising different services.
• The main role of a service within SOA is to provide
functionality.
• This is provided by three characteristics:
– An interface with the service which is platform- independent (not
dependent on a particular type of software or hardware). The
interface is accessible through applications development approaches
such as Microsoft.Net or Java and accessed through protocols such as
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) which is used for XML-
formatted messages.

Jagdish Bhatta 31
Web services SaaS, cloud computing and
service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• Service Oriented Architecture
• This is provided by three characteristics:
– The service can be dynamically located and invoked. One service can
query for the existence of another service through a service directory
– for example an e-commerce service could query for the existence of
a credit card authorization service.
– The service is self- contained. That is, the service cannot be influenced
by other services; rather it will return a required result to a request
from another service, but will not change state. Within web services,
messages and data are typically exchanged between services
using XML.

Jagdish Bhatta 32
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Intranet applications
• Intranets are used extensively for supporting sell- side e-
commerce from within the marketing function. They are also
used to support core supply chain management activities as
described in the next section on extranets. Today, they are
typically deployed as web- based services supplemented by
messages and alerts delivered by email or when users login to
a company network.

Jagdish Bhatta 33
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Intranet applications
• A marketing intranet has the following advantages:
– Reduced product life cycles – as information on product development
and marketing campaigns is rationalized we can get products to
market faster.
– Reduced costs through higher productivity, and savings on hard copy.
– Better customer service – responsive and personalized support with
staff accessing customers over the web.
– Distribution of information through remote offices nationally or
globally.

Jagdish Bhatta 34
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Intranet applications
• Intranets are also used for internal marketing communications
since they can include:
– Staff phone directories.
– Staff procedures or quality manuals.
– Information for agents such as product specifications, current list and
discounted prices, competitor information, factory schedules and
stocking levels, all of which normally have to be updated frequently
and can be costly.
– Staff bulletin or newsletter.
– Training courses.
• Intranets need to include a suitable technology to enable staff
to create and manage their own content. Content
management system (CMS) features are built into intranet
Jagdish Bhatta 35
and extranet systems to achieve this
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Extranet applications
• Any network connected to another network for the purpose
of sharing information and data. An extranet is created when
two businesses connect their respective intranets for business
communication and transactions.
• Business benefits of an extranet includes:
– Information sharing in secure environment
– Cost reduction
– Order processing and distribution
– Customer service

Jagdish Bhatta 36
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Extranet applications
• Many of the management issues involved with managing
extranets are similar to those for intranets. These are five key
questions that need to be asked when reviewing an existing
extranet or when creating a new extranet.
– Are the levels of usage sufficient? Extranets require a substantial
investment, so efforts need to be made to encourage usage since we
are asking the users of the service to change their behavior. It is in the
organization's interest to encourage usage, to achieve a return on their
investment and achieve the cost efficiencies intended.
– Is it effective and efficient? Controls must be put in place to assess
how well it is working and improve its performance. Return on
investment should be assessed. For example, visitor levels can be
measured for different types of audiences and the level of usage for
accessing different types of Jagdish
information
Bhatta can be assessed. 37
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Extranet applications
– Who has ownership of the extranet? Functions with an interest in an
extranet include IT (technical infrastructure), Finance (setting
payments and exchanging purchase orders and invoices), Marketing
(providing marketing materials and sales data to distributors or
providing services to customers) and Operations Management
(exchanging information about inventory). Clearly the needs of these
different parties must be resolved and management controls
established
– What are the levels of service quality? Since an extranet will become
a vital part of an organization's operating process, a problem with the
speed or availability of the extranet could cause loss of a lot of money;
it is arguably more important than the public-facing Internet site.
– Is the quality of the information adequate? The most important
attributes of information quality are that it is up to date and accurate.
If information is inaccurate or the
Jagdish extranet crashes.
Bhatta 38
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• IPTV (Internet TV)
• It is a Digital television service is delivered using Internet Protocol,
typically by a broadband connection. IPTV can be streamed for real-
time viewing or downloaded before playback.
• The growth in popularity of IPTV or ‘Internet TV’, where TV and video
are streamed via broadband across the Internet, is one of the most
exciting developments in recent years.
• IPTV is also used to deliver standard channels available on satellite.
Then there is also the IPTV option of digital TV downloaded before
playback, as is possible with many traditional broadcasters such as the
BBC, Sky or ITV using peer-to-peer distribution, where many users
download and share small chunks of the programme. Who pays for the
large bandwidth required by IPTV is an ongoing debate, covered in the
next section on net neutrality. It will be essential for marketers and ad
agencies to learn how to exploit
Jagdish Bhatta
IPTV in order to reach online
39
audience.
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Voice over IP (VoIP)
• In VoIP, Voice data is transferred across the Internet – it
enables phone calls to be made over the Internet.
• Voice over IP (VoIP) can be used for transmitting voice over a
LAN or on a wider scale. You will remember that IP stands for
Internet Protocol and so VoIP enables phone calls to be made
over the Internet. IP enables a single network to handle all
types of communications needs of an organisation, i.e. data,
voice and multimedia.
• VoIP is proving increasingly popular for reducing the cost of
making phone calls within an office and between offices,
particularly internationally.
Jagdish Bhatta 40
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Voice over IP (VoIP)
• The benefits include:
– Click-to-call: users click the number they want from an on-
screen directory.
– Call forwarding and conferencing to people at other
locations.
– Unified messaging: Emails, voicemails and faxes are all
integrated into a single inbox.
– Hot-desking: calls are routed to staff wherever they log in –
on-site or off- site.
– Cost control: review and allocation of costs between
different businesses is more transparent
Jagdish Bhatta 41
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Widgets
• It is a badge or button incorporated into a site or social network space
by its owner, with content or services typically served from another
site, making widgets effectively a minisoftware application or web
service. Content can be updated in real time since the widget interacts
with the server each time it loads.
• Widgets are tools made available on a website or on a user’s desktop.
They either provide some functionality, like a calculator, or they
provide real- time information, for example on news or weather.
• Site owners can encourage partners to place them on their sites and
this will help educate people about your brand, possibly generate
backlinks for SEO purposes and also engage with a brand when they’re
not on the brand owner’s site. Widgets offer partner sites the
opportunity to add value to their visitors through the gadget
functionality or content, or toJagdish
addBhatta
to their brand through association
42
with you (co-branding).
Managing internal digital communications
through intranets and extranets
• Widgets
• The main types of widget are:
– Web widgets: Web widgets have been used for a long time as part of
affiliate marketing, but they are getting more sophisticated, enabling
searches on a site, real- time price updates or even streaming video.
– Google gadgets: Different content can be incorporated onto a
personalised Google ‘iGoogle’ home page.
– Desktop and operating system gadgets: Microsoft Windows makes it
easier to create and enable subscription to these widgets and place
them into sidebars.
– Social media widgets: These encourage site visitors to subscribe to RSS
or to bookmark the page on their favorite social media site such as
Delicious, Digg or Technorati.
– Facebook applications: Facebook has opened up its API to enable
developers to create small Jagdish
interactive
Bhatta programs that users can add to
43
their space to personalize it.
Web presentation and data exchange standards
• Content:
• The information, graphics and interactive elements that make
up the web pages of a site are collectively referred to as
content.
• Good content is the key to attracting customers to a website
and retaining their interest or achieving repeat visits.
• Different standards exist for text, graphics and multimedia.
– XML
– Semantic web standards
– Microformats

Jagdish Bhatta 44
Web presentation and data exchange standards
• XML:
• It has been active in defining different forms of metadata to
support information access across the Internet.
• The significance of XML is indicated by its use for facilitating
supply chain management. For example, Microsoft’s BizTalk
server ( www.microsoft.com/biztalk ) for B2B application
integration is based on XML.
• ebXML (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup
Language), is a modular suite of specifications that enables
enterprises of any size and in any geographical location to
conduct business over the Internet. Using ebXML, companies
now have a standard method to exchange business messages,
conduct trading relationships, communicate data in common
terms and define and register business processes.
Jagdish Bhatta 45
Web presentation and data exchange standards
• Semantic web standards
• It includes interrelated content including data with defined meaning,
enabling better exchange of information between computers and
between people and computers.
• Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and linguistic
expressions. For example, the word ‘father’ has the semantic
elements male, human and parent and ‘girl’ has the elements female,
human and young.
• The semantic web is about how to define meaning for the content of
the web to make it easier to locate relevant information and services
rapidly.
• The semantic web describes the use of metadata through standards
such as XML to help users find web resources more readily.
• It will enable data exchange between software agents running on
different server or client computers.
Jagdish Bhatta 46
Web presentation and data exchange standards
• Semantic web standards
• The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0 is an
extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the
Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
• To enable the encoding of semantics with the data,
technologies such as Resource Description
Framework(RDF) and Web Ontology Language(OWL) are used.
These technologies are used to formally represent metadata.
For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships
between entities, and categories of things. These embedded
semantics offer significant advantages such as reasoning over
data and operating with heterogeneous data sources.
Jagdish Bhatta 47
Web presentation and data exchange standards
• Microformats
• Microformat is a simple set of formats based on XHTML for
describing and exchanging information about objects,
including product and travel reviews, recipes and event
information.
• Microformats are a practical example of the way the semantic
web will develop. Data can be exchanged through standard
microformats such as hCalendar and hReview which are used
to incorporate data from other sites into the Google listings
(www.microformats.org). You can see examples of
microformats which Google has incorporated as star ratings
from sites it has indexed if you perform a search on movies,
hotels or popular products
Jagdish Bhatta 48
Web presentation and data exchange standards
• Microformats
• hReview is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for
embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events,
etc.) in HTML, XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.
• hCalendar is a simple, open format for publishing events on
the web, using a 1:1 representation of iCalendar (RFC2445)
VEVENT properties and values in HTML. hCalendar is one of
several open microformat standards suitable for embedding
data in HTML/HTML5, and RSS/XHTML or other XML.

Jagdish Bhatta 49
Web presentation and data exchange standards
• Microformat

Jagdish Bhatta 50
Web presentation and data exchange standards,
• Microformat

Jagdish Bhatta 51
Web presentation and data exchange standards,
• Microformat

Jagdish Bhatta 52
Internet governance
• Internet Governance
• Internet governance controls of the operation and use of the
Internet.
• The Internet is quite different from all previous
communication media since it is much less easy for
governments to control and shape its development.
• here are number of established non-profit-making
organisations that control different aspects of the Internet.
These are sometimes called ‘supra-governmental’
organisations since their control is above government level.

Jagdish Bhatta 53
Internet governance
• The net neutrality principle
• It is the principle of provision of equal access to different
Internet services by telecommunications service providers.
• Net neutrality is the idea that all data on the Internet is equal,
and that networks, platforms and users should treat each
piece of data the same without giving any preference or
penalty to how fast that data moves around the Internet. The
principle means that data will not be slowed down (throttled)
or given any kind of preference - hence the idea of all data
being equal and ‘the Net’ being neutral.

Jagdish Bhatta 54
Internet governance
• The net neutrality principle
• The most common context for Net neutrality, is the desire by some
telecommunications companies and ISPs to offer tiered access to
particular Internet services. The wish of the ISPs is to potentially offer a
different quality of service, i.e. speed, to consumers, based on the fee
paid by the upstream content provider. So, potentially, ISPs could
charge companies such as TV channels more because they stream
content such as video content, which has high bandwidth
requirements.
• Less widely applied, but equally concerning, concept of Net neutrality
is the wish by some governments or other bodies to block access to
certain services or content. For example, Google has been criticized for
censoring its search results in China for certain terms such as
‘Tiananmen Square’. Similarly, Government of Nepal being criticized for
banning Tiktok.
Jagdish Bhatta 55
Internet governance
• Overview of ICANN, ISOC, IETF, W3, TINA-C
• The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
(www.icann.org)is the non-profit body formed for domain name and IP
address allocation and management. These were previously controlled
through US government contract by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority) and other entities.
• In the past, many of the essential technical coordination functions of
the Internet were handled on an ad hoc basis by US government
contractors and grantees, and a wide network of volunteers. This
informal structure represented the spirit and culture of the research
community in which the Internet was developed. However, the
growing international and commercial importance of the Internet has
necessitated the creation of a technical management and policy
development body that is more formalized in structure, more
transparent, more accountable, and more fully reflective of the
diversity of the world’s Internet communities.
Jagdish Bhatta 56
Internet governance
• Overview of ICANN, ISOC, IETF, W3, TINA-C
• The Internet Society (ISOC) (www.internetsociety.org)is a
professional membership society formed in 1992. It
summarizes its aims as to provide leadership in addressing
issues that confront the future of the Internet, and is the
organization home for the groups responsible for Internet
infrastructure standards, including the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). A
key aspect of the society’s mission statement is:
– To assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for
the benefit of people throughout the world. Although it focuses on
technical issues of standards and protocols, it is also conscious of how
these will affect global society.

Jagdish Bhatta 57
Internet governance
• Overview of ICANN, ISOC, IETF, W3, TINA-C
• IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) (www.ietf.org)is one of
the main technical bodies. It is an international community of
network designers, operators, vendors and researchers
concerned with the development of the Internet’s
architecture and its transport protocols such as IP.
• Significant subgroups are the Internet Architecture Board, a
technical advisory group of ISOC with a wide range of
responsibilities, and the Internet Engineering Steering Group,
which is responsible for overseeing the activities of the IETF
and the Internet standards process.

Jagdish Bhatta 58
Internet governance
• Overview of ICANN, ISOC, IETF, W3, TINA-C
• The World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org) is an
organization which is responsible for web standards. Its
director is Tim Berners-Lee.
• Today, it focuses on improving publishing standards such as
HTML and XML. The consortium also aims to promote
accessibility to the web, for instance for those with
disabilities.

Jagdish Bhatta 59
Internet governance
• Overview of ICANN, ISOC, IETF, W3, TINA-C
• (TINA-C, www.tinac.com) consortium takes a higher-level view
of how applications communicate over communications
networks. It does not define detailed standards. Its principles
are based on an object-orientated approach to enable easier
integration of systems. The purpose of these principles is to
insure interoperability, portability and reusability of software
components and independence from specific technologies,
and to share the burden of creating and managing a complex
system among different business stakeholders, such as
consumers, service providers, and connectivity providers.

Jagdish Bhatta 60
Internet governance
• How can companies influence or take control of Internet
standards?
• It can be argued that companies seek control of the Internet to gain
competitive advantage. For example, Microsoft used what have been
judged as anti-competitive tactics to gain a large market share for its
browser, Internet Explorer. In a five-year period, it achieved over 75%
market share, which has given it advantages in other areas of e-commerce
such as advertising revenue through its portal MSN (www.msn.com) and
retail through its sites such as travel site Expedia (www.expedia.com).
• Microsoft has also sought to control standards such as HTML and has
introduced rival standards or variants of other standards.
• Arguably, Google’s prominent position of power in being the most popular
search engine makes it possible for Google to influence whole matters of
business decision-making. Many companies have complained about
Google’s undue influence on the visibility of search results and there have
been a number of legal issues raised at governmental level, particularly in
Jagdish Bhatta 61
Internet governance
• How can companies influence or take control of Internet
standards?
• The existence of global Internet standards bodies arguably means that it is
less likely that one company can develop proprietary standards, although
Microsoft has been successfully using this approach for many years.
• Companies such as Microsoft have to lobby independent organisations to
have their input into standards such as XML. Businesses can protect their
interests in the Internet by lobbying these organisations or governments,
or subscribing as members and having employees involved with
development of standards

Jagdish Bhatta 62
Internet governance
• How can companies influence or take control of Internet
standards?
• Many remain worried about the future control of the Internet
by companies; the ‘World of Ends’ campaign
(www.worldofends.com) illustrates some of the problems
where control can limit consumer choice and stifle innovation.
But the future of the Internet is assured because the three
core principles espoused in the World of Ends document
remain true:
– No one owns it.
– Everyone can use it.
– Anyone can improve it.
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• Reference and Acknowledgement
• Dave Chaffey, Tanya Hemphill, David
Edmundson-Bird, Digital Business and E-
Commerce Management, Pearson, 6th Edition

Jagdish Bhatta 64

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