Recent decades have shown a tremendous expansion of the Internet. The number of
connected terminals has increased by orders of magnitude, traffic has grown exponen-
tially, coverage has become ubiquitous and worldwide, and today’s sophisticated Web
2.0 applications are increasingly providing services which hitherto have been the realm
of telecommunications, such as Skype and video conferencing. This has even led to the
thought that access to the Internet might one day be a universal right of every citizen.
This evolution will accelerate in the coming decades.
