At the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) held in Kyoto in October 2023, the overarching theme was “The Internet We Want—Empowering All People,” and at the IGF in Riyadh, UAE, in December 2024, it was “Building Our Multistakeholder Digital Future.”
We have created a shared digital infrastructure that spans the globe (the Internet), interconnecting autonomous networks built and operated through a whole range of technologies and organizations, all based on the same unified technology (TCP/IP) at its core. The first TCP/IP network in Japan was JUNET, which marked its 40th anniversary in 2024. JUNET, or Japan UNIX Network, was a digital computer network built on UNIX as its common OS foundation, and had a network structure that mirrored the structure and architecture of UNIX systems running TCP/IP as part of their OS. JUNET was interconnected with networks operated by pioneering researchers around the world. From the start, the goal was to ensure that this globe-spanning digital space is able to host a great diversity of communities and permit individuals, diverse communities, and organizations the freedom to use this digital computer network (the Internet) unrestrained by national borders and other geographic restrictions. In today’s terminology, this can be described as the operation and management of global infrastructure on a multistakeholder basis. This digital computer network space is now poised to expand beyond Earth’s surface, from the skies to beyond our atmosphere, and then on to the Moon and outer space, thus reaching areas so far uninhabited and not covered by such a network.
In November 2024, we welcomed Ted Nelson, the man who coined the term hypertext, to Japan. He spoke to us about the history of his work in the 1960s, a time when computers were thought of a simply being there to perform calculations, and how he and others essentially discovered and advocated for the idea that computers + networks should support and stimulate human creativity through the meaning of information presented on displays and the inter-linking of data (hyperlinks), the true essence of the Internet. This was an opportunity to revisit the idea that the Internet provides the ability to perform operations on digital data (with each operation constituting a computation) and the networking capability to freely reference, move, and use that data. I think this is a key point that relates to the true impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on social and industrial activities in recent years.
Generative AI has become a major talking point in the past few years, and research and development related to generative AI and efforts to apply it in business expanded even more rapidly in 2024, going so far as to prompt substantial changes to Japan’s Strategic Energy Plan. The plan indicates that the semiconductor industry, which underpins our digital society as exemplified by AI, and the digital infrastructure industry, where data centers are front and center, are essential not only in enhancing efficiency in society and across industry but also in transforming and evolving the structure of society and industry as a whole. It goes on to say that increases in Japan’s total national power consumption must be tolerated as these industries expand, and argues for the need to bolster Japan’s energy infrastructure and strategically integrate it with communication infrastructure. Leading-edge digital technologies like generative AI will not merely enhance the efficiency of existing (as-is) systems but also create entirely new (to-be) digital-native systems, and I think creating such to-be systems is one of WIDE Project’s responsibilities. That is, to ensure the Internet evolves further and is used to its maximum potential, we believe we need to continue to drive the evolution of not only as-is but also to-be systems and industries. Global warming will no doubt start to look like an insurmountable challenge unless we do this.
When it comes to generative AI, people already knew that the explosive increase in false information along with the pronounced difficulty of recognizing and authenticating such information was a major problem, and this became a widely acknowledged issue during the numerous elections held during 2024. The US presidential election and the Hyogo gubernatorial election in November 2024 highlighted these issues for a broader audience. We must recognize both the positive and negative aspects of generative AI and explore the question of how individuals and society can coexist with it.
Many people associated with WIDE Project, including founder Jun Murai, were heavily involved in the launch of Japan’s Digital Agency back in September 2020 and indeed remain heavily involved in its activities to this day. These efforts have been directed toward the real-world implementation of an environment in which computers all over Japan are connected to broadband Internet, as put forward in the e-Japan concept floated around 2000. WIDE Project sees this as the interconnection of all industries and the creation of an environment in which all digital devices have an IP and are interconnected, and has been pursuing research and development on IPv6 alongside research and development efforts relevant to rolling it out in society to make the IoT (Internet of Things) a reality. IPv6 penetration has reached milestone levels in Japan, at over 80% on fixed-line connections and closing in on 70% in the mobile phone space. The IPv6 Promotion Council and the Initiative for IPv6-based Internet (formerly the Task Force on IPv4 Address Exhaustion), organizations that WIDE Project played a central role in establishing, were wound up in March 2024.
During the Covid pandemic, the Kishida administration put forward the Digital Garden City Nation vision for Japan’s evolution toward cyber-first social and industrial infrastructure premised on the notion of an online society. This is a vision for infrastructure that transparently interconnects all people, all industries, and all digital devices across the globe and thereby drives the creation of innovative, never-before-seen services. The pandemic revealed and accentuated social problems that already existed before Covid, such as discrimination and widening disparities, and it has shown just how much the power of humanity pales in the face of the power of nature, prompting an acute awareness of the importance of pursuing the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) and carbon neutrality. I believe we must apply, and indeed unleash, the architecture of the Internet to all social and industrial infrastructure if we are to achieve the SDGs.
As a group of Internet technology experts, WIDE Project must work together with collaborators worldwide to maintain our global digital spaces, including outer space, for a new era without decoupling, and pass them on to the next generation. As digital computer network experts, we must cooperate with people the world over to solve the myriad problems and challenges that we humans face not only within Japan but around the globe and in space.
WIDE Project is operated as a consortium of academic and industrial partners. By offering an environment geared toward practical and applied research—which differs from the objective-based research common to business organizations and fundamental research found in academic circles, where creativity and originality are sought—WIDE Project has been able to achieve results that go beyond those of conventional research institutions. Moreover, WIDE Project always looks at entire systems and individual systems from a global perspective (and now from the even more broad and expansive perspective of space exploration). This is a research model unique to WIDE as a defining element, part of its genetic code, and it is essential that we further develop and maintain this approach to our research.
In closing, I would like to reiterate my sincerest gratitude to all those individuals and organizations that have supported the activities of WIDE Project and ask for your continued participation, cooperation, guidance and encouragement, and I also ask that you refer potential new participants to us, whether they be individuals or organizations. With your help and cooperation, I am excited at the prospect of being able to expand our collaborative efforts to create new global digital social infrastructure.
March 2025