As the Internet was opened to commercial use in the 1990s, access became available to people outside of academic and research organizations. Various companies -- large and small, local and national -- began to offer dial-up access to the Internet for people who wanted to exchange information by such methods as email, newsgroups, file sharing and online chat. This information sharing typically involved a mix of "upstream" and "downstream" data transfer between users and ISPs. For example, when user A sent user B an email message, information went upstream to A's ISP (X), across the Internet to B's ISP (Y), and then downstream to B. When user B sent an email reply, information was sent in the opposite direction.
The dial-up connections that people used to share information across the Internet in this way were symmetric, in that they were able to transmit data between the user and their ISP both upstream and downstream with equal facility. The same was true for the higher-speed telecom connections between IPSs. In the early days of the Internet, these symmetric connections were intended to facilitate long-distance collaborations in which the various participants all had information and ideas to share.
As the Internet grew and evolved, people began to feel constrained by the data transfer speeds of dial-up connections. As DSL and cable connections became available, they were rapidly adopted by those seeking greater bandwidth. These new technologies were deployed, in most cases, to provide higher data rates downstream than upstream, making them different from the telecom connections that had previously been used for Internet connections.
Today we have an Internet over which a small number of "content providers" send large amounts of data downstream to end users. Is this a natural evolution to which technology has adapted, or has the technology itself produced this result?
I understand that certain kinds of content are easier to consume than to produce, leading to a natural asymmetry in the proportion of writers to readers, performers to audience, etc. However, the skills and talents required to produce good content are, I believe, distributed around the globe. Furthermore, the kind of data that can be carried by the Internet can be used for many purposes. So my questions are these: If we had an Internet that gave us all a high-speed connection both upstream and downstream, would the way we use the Internet change? Would the Internet be used for two-way communication and collaboration more than it is today? Would more good writing, good photography, good music, good video, good ideas be available to us? Would innovators be stimulated to create new technologies and new applications?
Why do we have an asymmetric Internet? Is what we get based on what we want, or is what we seem to want based on what we get?
