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Researchers Scheming to Rebuild Internet From Scratch

Posted by Zonk on from the can-i-have-the-old-one-when-you're-done-with-it dept.

BobB writes "Stanford University researchers have launched an initiative called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. The project aims to make the network more secure, have higher throughput, and support better applications, all by essentially rebuilding the Internet from scratch. From the article: 'Among McKeown's cohorts on the effort is electrical engineering Professor Bernd Girod, a pioneer of Internet multimedia delivery. Vendors such as Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and NEC are also involved. The researchers already have projects underway to support their effort: Flow-level models for the future Internet; clean slate approach to wireless spectrum usage; fast dynamic optical light paths for the Internet core; and a clean slate approach to enterprise network security (Ethane).'"

32 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. The Six Million Dollar 'Net. by mikecardii · · Score: 5, Funny

    Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the techonology. We can make it better, faster, stronger.

    1. Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. by kaizenfury7 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      ....and with DRM baked in.

    2. Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. by KingSkippus · · Score: 4, Informative

      Now if we could only rewrite Windows from the ground up

      Didn't you see the story the other day?

      We are.

    3. Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. by cayenne8 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      "Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the techonology. We can make it better, faster, stronger."

      Unfortunatly, I'm afraid they will make it more censorable, more business oriented vs. regular people, less anonymous, more regulated, govt/UN controlled, politically correct...and as someone mentioned, full DRM support forever.

      Frankly, for all its faults, I like the internet now as it is...kind of the 'wild west' of information. That just has to 'kill' some of those in power around the world.

      I think the last thing we want to do, is recreate it, now that those in power know what free flow of information can do...

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    4. Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. by westlake · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I like the internet now as it is...kind of the 'wild west' of information.

      The "Wild West" exists (and perhaps always has existed) mostly in fiction.

      In history it begins with the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and ends in 1876 at the Little Big Horn. The Last Stand for the Plains Indians as well as for Custer.

      It's a brief moment in time - and, in some ways, a pattern of settlement unique to the United States.

      It shouldn't surprise anyone if the Internet frontier has it's own ending.

    5. Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. by GringoCroco · · Score: 3, Informative
      From the whitepaper PDF:

      It should be:
      1. Robust and available
      2. Inherently secure.
      3. Support mobile end-hosts
      4. Economically viable and profitable.
      5. Evolvable.
      6. Predictable
      7. Support anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary.
    6. Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. by trianglman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      7. Support anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary.
      Who determines necessity? If left up to any current government, the necessity would be determined by who wants to be anonymous. Senators - sure, they need privacy for their solicitations of pages; Joe Shmoe Public - nah, its better to keep tabs on him, he could be a terrorist...
      --
      Clones are people two.
    7. Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. by alphamugwump · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You kind of picked a bad example, as vorbis is actually quite popular in some domains (games, for example), is supported by several hardware players, and gives better compression than mp3.

      Of course, the idea of rebuilding the internet is a load of bull. The article lists a bunch of things you supposedly can't do with regular protocols, and takes those as reasons for change. They seem to think we can't do multicast, QOS, or security with current protocols. They also seem to think that, since wireless is so different from land lines, we should need new protocols. Their plans also happen to destroy any possibility of network neutrality.

      I sincerely hope this project doesn't get any government funding.

  2. Damnit by 0racle · · Score: 5, Funny

    I haven't even upgraded to Internet2 and Web 2.0 and they're already doing work on Internet3.

    --
    "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    1. Re:Damnit by saskboy · · Score: 4, Funny

      And here I thought we were already running Internet 7

      ~ Some Microsoft noob

      --
      Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
  3. What are the odds by Lokatana · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What are the odds that, even given a great plan, that this has any hope of making it to daylight. IPv6 has been out for how long, yet how much real adoption have we seen in that space?

    1. Re:What are the odds by griebels2 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The problem of IPv6 is due to the fact that it just doesn't work besides IPv4. You essentially need to build and maintain two seperate networks. Yes, you can share the same equipment, but the amount of configuration involved almost never justifies the efforts in corporate environments.

      In my opinion, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed for an "Internet for the future". One of the biggest hurdles of course is the address space shortage of IPv4, but there are a lot of other issues which need to be solved. Just to name a few:
      - More flexible routing of unique identifiers (let's call them IP numbers), so I can take my "identifier" with me (think mobile phones)
      - A solution to the ever growing "global routing table" (BGP4 as it is used today)
      - Better support for quality of service from end-to-end.
      - Better "multicasting" support, also end-to-end. (Let's avoid burning down networks during "cataclysmic" events)
      - Better redundancy. Although dynamic routing protocols should heal this problems, in practice they often fail to do this. Especially in cases where connections are semi-dead)
      - A much better built-in protection against DDoSes and other kind of abuses.

      Unfortunately, IPv6 really fixes none of those problems, except the IP number shortage. IPv6 also comes at great costs, since you need to upgrade your whole infrastructure at once, or it isn't really usable.

      So, IPv6 might have been a nice lesson for the next generation "IP protocol". IMHO this next generation should take the following things in mind:

      - Transition only works if it plays nicely with the legacy stuff during the transition.
      - Transition has either to be cheap or must have so many advantages that you simply cannot refuse.
      - Vendors need to agree upon a single standard, or somebody with a large impact should "dictate" it in the worst scenario.

      Reading TFA, I was quite disapointed, because anything about how this transition to this cleanslate network seems to be absent at this time. But it is still a research project and maybe somebody did learn something from the IPv6 "fiasco".

    2. Re:What are the odds by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The flip side is that some of your suggestions can have detrimental effects too:

      - Better support for quality of service from end-to-end.

      In other words, better support for introducing favoritism between ISPs and content providers, so that (for example) AT&T can extort money from Google and shut down BitTorrent. No thanks; I prefer the "dumb," route-everything-equally, neutral Internet we have now.

      - A much better built-in protection against DDoSes and other kind of abuses.

      And much better protection against free speech, anonymity, etc. Again, no thanks.

      - Vendors need to agree upon a single standard, or somebody with a large impact should "dictate" it in the worst scenario. [emphasis added]

      Yeah, that "somebody" being AT&T or Microsoft, who would undoubtedly screw it up with Treacherous Computing, built-in "micropayment" toll booths, and assorted other bullshit. Still sound like a great idea?

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    3. Re:What are the odds by griebels2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In other words, better support for introducing favoritism between ISPs and content providers, so that (for example) AT&T can extort money from Google and shut down BitTorrent. No thanks; I prefer the "dumb," route-everything-equally, neutral Internet we have now. Do you really think the Internet is this "neutral" right now? I've worked for several ISPs and know all about routing traffic the cheapest, yet still acceptable way. In the end, I always was the techie and only wanted to get my traffic to the destination in a way the least users would complain about "speed" without violating traffic commitments from our upstreams. This "net neutrality" is only politically . I'm a big ISP and I want money from Google? I just route all my traffic to Google to this already filled-up-to-the-max transit link and let Google pay for a direct peering with me. The way this works in practice? The ISP's helpdesk will get flooded by complaints and this "upgrade" will be undone within a few days, until the next manager comes by with yet another great idea to make some more money. Being an somewhat honest ISP, better QoS support from end-to-end will give me much more possibilities to deliver services to my customers in a more reliable way. I could, for example, avoid customers line filling up with bitorrent while using Skype. There is no way of doing this right now. So better QoS support across the Internet is really a cornerstone for reliable services delivered across the Internet, especially for a neutral net.

      And much better protection against free speech, anonymity, etc. Again, no thanks. In an Internet without any protection against those kinds of attacks, the one with the biggest botnet wins? There are many ways to implement this kind of protection right into the protocol, without losing any kind of anonymity. Detecting and mitigating DDoSes more close to the source for example. Also, when I don't want to receive your traffic, why do I have to block it on the receiving end? How anonymous do you think you really are? Everything you do leaves traces. Posting on slashdot leaves your IP and your IP can always be traced back to your ISP. Your ISP will probably retain some logfiles, like from which DSL line did it come, from which dialup bank, etc. Public WiFi hotspots or some "anonymity services" might give you some anonymity, they will probably also do so in a "DDoS protected" environment.

      Yeah, that "somebody" being AT&T or Microsoft, who would undoubtedly screw it up with Treacherous Computing, built-in "micropayment" toll booths, and assorted other bullshit. Still sound like a great idea? Many of the not-so-evil standards we use today were originally conceived by private or public companies. Sometimes you cannot rely on "standards organisations", because they just are so damn slow and have a tendency to come up with standards that are to much of a compromise. Fortunately, not all companies think they can rule the world alone. For the remaining companies, let's hope they see their quasi-monopolies erode in the end.
  4. anonymity vs. accountability by Red+Flayer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can be found here, is linked to within the first link provided in the summary.

    One of the most interesting criteria for a new internet, to me, was criteria #7:

    Support anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary.

    Maybe it's just me, but it seems true anonymity is becoming more and more important, and less and less available, as governments snoop more on the internet.

    --
    "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
    1. Re:anonymity vs. accountability by ScentCone · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Maybe it's just me, but it seems true anonymity is becoming more and more important, and less and less available, as governments snoop more on the internet.

      On the other hand, unless you want this to be a tool only for and by the government, you've got to get businesses comfortable with it. Banks. Retailers. Airlines. Anonymity (of the you-can't-track-my-pr0n-use, or the posting-as-a-troll, or the PRC-can't-ID-the-rebel variety) is antithetical to trustworthy transactions, and without money changing hands, the plumbing is WAY less useful to the huge swaths of the economy that would fund (indirectly) the growth and adoption of such a thing.

      "Where prudent" and "as necessary" etc., are completely subjective. People who like to rip off movies have one set of priorities, and people who administer your payroll or need to transmit your cancer meds prescription are looking at it from a very different perspective.

      --
      Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
  5. Re:Won't work IMO by jandrese · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most corporate networks make sense when they were first deployed, but that was back in the 80s and the technology (not to mention corporate layout) has changed enough that it seems crazy today. I know our tech guys here work really hard to keep everything up to date, and for the most part our network is sane, but sometimes there are cases of legacy systems that really look out of place next to everything else.

    I want to know how they're going to avoid the second system effect with their new internet. One of the big reasons the Internet works is because a lot of effort was spent in keeping everything reasonably simple. Time has shown that anything that start out highly complicated tends to be only very slowly adopted, if at all. IP may have terrible security but at least it doesn't require someone 10 man-years to build a fully compliant router.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
  6. Hasn't this been tried before? by michaelmalak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think it was called OS/2. Or maybe 68000. Or was it Itanium?

  7. Who's In Charge? by adavies42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unless this is being run by the IETF with EFF looking over their shoulder the whole time, I don't trust this to end up as something I want to use.

    --
    Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
    -kfg
  8. This reminds me of Meskimen's Law... by wuie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over."

    1. Re:This reminds me of Meskimen's Law... by starseeker · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As frustrating as it may seem, there are actually fairly sound reasons for this in some situations. I would argue the internet was one.

      In theory, ten years of computer science research might have produced a better design for the internet than the one we have today, back when it was first being developed. However, we have learned a lot from the scale-up that on a practical level would be fairly hard to duplicate in a research setting. Sometimes you just don't think of the possible consequences until you see them happen, particularly things due to human beings TRYING to bring down the system. Think about how long telnet lasted, for example.

      In all honesty, it's a miracle the world wide web has scaled the way it has - consider the original scope of the military networks and the small amounts of data they were transmitting. The original designs were to Get Something Working and Justify Our Budget - that's how it has to work. I'd say the return on investment for the various stages of the internet has always more than justified even the costs of redoing it. Sometimes you can't wait to figure out how to do it right, because that will take too much time and what you can build NOW is still useful. Think about automobiles - 10 years from now we will undoubtedly be building better ones than we can build today, but the costs of waiting until we know how to do it "right" are much higher than the costs of replacement.

      Now, of course, the question of knowing how to do something right is distinct from doing correctly what we already know how to do - one is a research problem, one is an implementation problem. I'm inclined to think that the web is more of a research limitation than a "do it right" issue, although I could be wrong - it depends on how much was known in the beginning states.

      --
      "I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
  9. Thats it... I'm gona make my OWN internet. by Kenja · · Score: 4, Funny

    Thats it... I'm gona make my OWN internet. With blackjack, and hookers. In fact, forget about the blackjack and the internet.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
  10. Oh yeah, we really need this :( by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Hmmm, yep, let's get the experts to redesign the best network ever made.

    Let's get the guys that designed all those "wonderful" networks:

    • Morse Code
    • TeleText
    • Telex
    • DECNet
    • IBM's VTAM
    • IBM's CICS
    • IBM's SNA
    • Banyan Vines
    • AppleTalk
    • TELENET
    • CDCNET
    • IBM's LU 6
    • ISO net

    Oh yeah, let's get the "EXPERTS" involved!

  11. Re:Clean Slate vs. Gummed-upTubes by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Get rid of the porn? That's what the internet is for. Everything else is just interfering with porn.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  12. Re:Hmm.. by choongiri · · Score: 4, Funny

    Pssst... I think you may find this page informative:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke

  13. Re:Clean Slate vs. Gummed-upTubes by daeg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What's wrong with porn? The network design shouldn't care about content. That's a place for your personal morals or corporate rules, not network topology.

  14. Rebuild the Internet by hackus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Translation:

    Lets rebuild the internet because it uses too much open source software and we are not making enough money. I know! Lets get all the vendors together and rebuild it using proprietary crud so that it is impossible for any of these "open source" guys to make server platforms that are freely available.

    Lets kill open standards too, because well....who needs those IETF guys anyway! They are just a bunch hippies!

    Seriously, though. The internet works better than my cell phone does.

    It doesn't need "fixing".

    It just needs a few upgrades.

    IPV6 would be a nice place to start!

    GAD.

    The thought of CISCO having a hand in anything the future internet could be makes me want to quit my current network manager job and open an Italian Restraunt.

    -gc

    -hack

    --
    Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
    1. Re:Rebuild the Internet by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm with you. These guys are completely on crack. Haven't they ever read "Netheads vs. Bellheads"? You do not want to have intelligence inside the network, ever. Intelligence belongs at the edge. The core should be application-unaware, stupid, unreliable, and as simple as possible. Which is the Internet we have today, and it works great, thank you very much.

  15. Re:What material will they use? by dubbreak · · Score: 4, Funny

    It is just a bunch of tubes right?

    Actually they discovered the problem is that the current internet is a bunch of tubes. Tubes get clogged. The new internet will be big trucks you dump stuff on.

    --
    "If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
  16. Internet Mail 2000 anyone? by Inmatarian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000

    The name is crappy, but the concept is a really good start. It's a shame this never caught on. Basically, Email's Subjects and Bodies are split, and the Subject is sent to the Receiver, and the Body is stored at the Sender's server. When the Receiver gets the Subject notification, they connect to the Sender's server and download the Body.

    The point of this strange scheme would be to crush spammers under the weight of their own To list, by having millions of incoming connections. The burden of storage goes to the Sender, not the Receiver.

    That should be one of the technologies Web 11.0 should implement. Somebody call up Al Gore and tell him this.

  17. Not exactly by mengel · · Score: 5, Informative
    I couldn't help chuckling as I read the above post, as it outlines all of the things that were presented as benefits of moving to IPv6 when it was initially released. For example:
    • There are several mechanisms for running IPv4 and IPv6 side by side, and that was a major part of the discussion in the IPv6 rollout early on. Medium sized chunks of the net were running IPv6 for quite a while, and were routed in and out of fairly seamlessly. transition mechanisms were designed, long before IPv6 was adopted by the IETF. (the linked RFC is from 1995).
    • IPv6 designers also put in tools designed to provide for mobile endpoints, although better designs have come out since.
    • IPv6 provides and uses multicast addresses as part of it's initial design, and its multicast is being used successfully.
    You can claim that the implementations provided weren't good enough (although I'd like to see some actual data to back that up), but in fact the folks that did IPv6 did have all of those goals in mind when they put IPv6 together.
    --
    - "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
  18. A new Internet economics. A worse Internet. by Nicopa · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The current internet is to equalitary for them. In their whitepaper they state:

    [...] A related issue is that the current Internet does not provide support for differentiating between different packets on economic grounds. For example, two packets with the same origin and destination will typically be routed on the same path through the network, even if the packets have very different values.

    "Outrageous! The rich treated the same as the poor!" They want an internet in which a porn movie downloaded by a CEO preempts and disturbs a critical communication from a hospital to an investigation center.

    The internet as we have it is an open field. A dumb, simple, protocol so that people can innovate in the sides. This enabled us to be independent from ISP and to design new protocols (Gnutella, Bittorrent, etc.). Of course, they now say that this "dumbness" produced lack of innovation:

    Resistance to change is compounded by the end-to-end design philosophy that makes the Internet "smart" at the edges and "dumb" in the middle. While a dumb infrastructure led to rapid growth, it doesn't have the flexibility or intelligence to allow new ideas to be tested and deployed. There are many examples of how the dumbness of the network has led to ossification, such as the long time it took to deploy IPv6, multicast, and the very limited deployment of differentiated qualities of service. Deploying these well-known ideas has been hard enough; deploying radically new architectures is unthinkable today.

    It's not clear to me how having a more complex internet in the middle will be able to ease its growth. It seems as the opposite, as more complex middleware will be more complex to upgrade and setup. In fact, the main reason the current internet has "ossificated" *is* dumbness in the middle, but other kind of dumbness. The commercial companies' dumb administrators, dumb managers, who didn't care to provide us multicast, IPv6, mobile ip, IPsec, etc.

    The Internet as we have it could never had happened if it were for the private sector. It's too open, private companies don't like standards. See how the classical internet infrastructure got frozen when the commercial companies took over internet in the last century. HTTP, IMAP, POP, HTML, etc. got stuck in their last versions. It's because Internet needs a strong *public* presence. Companies can exist, provide service, but Internet needs a strong presence by the people (in the form of the state..? Universities? I don't know...)

    This group is not aiming at a better, utopic, internet. They are trying to recapture what they've lost when their CCITT (X.25, X.400, X.500) network wreck.