Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarzenstabber, your host. On today's show,

software-defined networking. The way we use the internet is changing, and the way we manage

internet traffic must change with it.

Joining me to discuss this is Evelyn Smith, a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute.

Evelyn, thanks for joining the show again.

Thanks for having me back.

So before we get into exactly what software-defined networking is, briefly summarize the radical

changes in internet usage that we've seen since its

inception. Yeah, so it's really important to have some context for how these habits have

changed. I mean, if you go back to the early 2000s, YouTube wasn't a thing or is barely a thing,

Spotify wasn't out yet, Netflix was still a DVD by mail service.

Practically no one had iPhones. Well, the iPhone wasn't even out yet. It didn't come out until 2007.

And so no one had like smartphones as we think of smartphones today. So in terms of how we spent our time online, it was mostly static web surfing, lots of MySpace, lots of

AIM. I know I myself spent a lot of time chatting awkwardly with my crushes on AIM for most of

the early 2000s. So there wasn't a lot of video traffic, not a lot of voice. And most of our

experience of the internet was usually attached to like a desktop computer or a laptop. And so what

that means for network

engineers is that they had a relatively easy time in terms of managing the traffic that passed

across their networks. The demands on their networks were relatively simple. They were

relatively consistent. The devices they had to configure to work with the network were smaller

in number. And the volume and complexity of the

data that they had to contend with was relatively minimal. And of course, moving to today,

...