Researchers Scheming to Rebuild Internet From Scratch

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).'"

Comments

The Six Million Dollar 'Net.

[mikecardii]

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

Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net.

[cayenne8]

"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...

Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net.

[trianglman]

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...

Damnit

[0racle]

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

What are the odds

[Lokatana]

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?

Re:What are the odds

[mrchaotica]

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?

Who's In Charge?

[adavies42]

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.

Rebuild the Internet

[hackus]

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

Not exactly

[mengel]

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.