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National Projects Aim to Reboot the Internet
iron-kurton wrote with a link to an AP story about a national initiative to scrap the internet and start over. You may remember our discussion last month about Stanford's Clean Slate Design project; this article details similar projects across the country, all with the federal government's blessing and all with the end goal of revamping our current networking system. From the article: "No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes. Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was 'generally healthy' because the current technology 'does not satisfy all needs.'"
Is this one of those 'forced upgrade' things so hardware and software manufacturers can make a heap of money selling more stuff?
And get ready for a whole heap more IP claims and big corps attempting to own the internet.
The Internet is basically fair, because when it was designed no one knew how insanely profitable and important it would be. At the time, no one cared about the net except the people who designed it, so they could do it honestly.
Any new design will inevitably be corrupted by the interests of large companies, and of governments who would feel the need to have their ability to spy on and control traffic protected.
I don't think any one group can say that we're going to scrap the internet and start over. Hell, the US government couldn't convert its citizens to the metric system and they're the ones that control the measurements. No entity controls the internet and that's what makes it so great. If someone thinks they have a better idea of how it should work let them create their own networks of computers and run their own protocols and standards and we'll see which one the consumers prefer. Probably the one they already have thousands of dollars invested in, are familiar with, and have *freedom* to navigate.
Can anyone reference a national system that was successfully replaced? I heard rumor that a very small country changed which side of the road they drove on in the past ten years. The Internet is a global system - fat chance of any cold turkey changes.
Besides which, lets assume that there is a massive change to the internet. There are plenty of geeks in the world with the knowledge and capabilities to set up their own networks and build an internet of their own. How many of us have wired and wireless internetworks between apartments, dorms, and neighboring houses already? It would just become even more prevalent.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The Internet won't be replaced this way, but it's still a useful exercise. You spend some money researching the "what if" scenario, get some results you didn't expect, and then you adapt the technology to the existing infrastructure.
http://outcampaign.org/
What a huge waste of money. Sure they could build DRM and WGA and SonOfClipper in at the lowest level, but really, what's in it for the rest of us?
You never know. The guys raising money for this will beat the pr0nography and DRM drum enough that some politicians will be impressed and throw some of (your) money at it. But are they going to convince business and the public for massive retooling costs, when in the end, we'll have something very similar to what we have at the moment.
There are better uses for money. Try Cancer research or something else instead please.
We're at a point where total reboot/scrapping of the Internet is as likely as waking up tommorow and finding all of IPv4 scrapped in favor of new shiny IPv6.
There's more loss in scrapping everything and starting over than it is to improve existing solutions in a compatible manner.
Another example: everybody knows the x86 instruction set and interface sucks. It so sucks, that for quite some time AMD and Intel don't produce x86 chips anymore. Have you felt any revolution or "scrapping" going on"? No because all modern chips will take the x86 instructions and translate them internally, so on the outside the chip works with x86 software.
This is how progress works: if something is used massively world-wide, and something sucks about it, expect slow gradual transition, where the offending problems will be tucked away in a compatibility, emulation, translation layer and earth keeps spinning.
I wondered how long it would take before the topic of re-designing the Internet started making general rounds.
No one really owns it, and governments can't really control it. How long did we think that would last? I'm sure there are plenty of true benefits that would emerge, but we all know what we will really end up with is a DRM infested wiretap paradise that only serves the financial interests of corporations and the control aims of governments. Mind you, whether its an incremental upgrade or a complete replacement I think these aspects of the Internet will become inevitable - it's just a question of how long it will take.
Well it might be a good opportunity to use IPv6 so IP hoarding won't be too much of a problem.
I think you're being a little optomistic in thinking that the US doesn't want to control what people can do. Given enough time i'd pretty much expect the internet to become the christianet if it was just up to the US.
Instead I think the entire thing should be organised by Yukoslavia, not because they'll be neutral about it, but because they never get a turn at having way too much power.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
The current internet is working well, and with proper management it will continue to do so.
That't the problem. The powers that be don't want the internet to work as well as it does. Instead they want to control it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
IPv6 addresses many of the current problems. IPv6 is a standard, supported by many vendors. IPv6 plays nicely with IPv4, so you don't have to break the world in order to deploy it. IPv6 has been around for years...
Seriously, if we can't get people to adopt IPv6, what's the chance that people are going to adopt something more disruptive?
I've seen some of these proposals, and technically they're interesting. From the perspective of getting the market to move in a new direction, things will have to get a lot worse before they're even taken seriously.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
People have been talking about this since 1998. On Halloween of that year, Eric Raymond had several Microsoft internal emails forwarded anonymously to him. They outlined how Microsoft could respond to the Open Source Threat. The single most telling quote runs like this:
At the World Wide Web conference in Amsterdam In 2000, Lawrence Lessig spoke clearly about the threat to the principle of the 'end to end' network (i.e. the Internet as designed). At that time he was speaking about the intent of the telcos to subvert it through WAP, but the prophetic nature of his comments are made visible by endeavours such as these.
Make no mistake, folks: the shiny new future that's being laid out for us here will have none of the freedoms that we enjoy today, where access to information is concerned. This is something that needs to be opposed early, loudly and without compromise.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
As to the rest of the paragraph, it's just as misguided. When was the last time you weren't able to connect to the internet due to "equipment failures" other than your own CPE? Or the last time you couldn't get to a site because there was no route to it? Personally (and I use the internet every day, and have for the last 7-8 years, just like almost everyone else on this site), I haven't seen it. The only time I get "Cannot connect to site" is when a page tries to access doubleclick, which I have routed to 127.0.0.1 in
This article sounds like propaganda from the Committee for a More Profitable Internet.
Just junk food for thought...
Truly. For years we've had governments and other special interests clamoring for change because they fear the digital age. In part due to this, we've lost more and more freedoms while the sheeple of the world are led by the ring in the nose ( which they are not even aware of ) into believing that everything is ok; Nothing going wrong here.
So let them redo the internet into a new corporate-friendly version. Let them rape us six ways from sunday. After working in the industry as I have, I could just as easily walk away and leave it to other more patient and gullible folks to handle.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The only reason that the Internet isn't a fascist's wet DRM dream presently is because when it started there was no need (only authorized personnel had access anyway, and the only media was ASCII porn) and by the time they (authoritarians, facists, and control freaks) first realized what was happenning, it was too late.
You better believe that if a new Internet were designed today, it would be another TV: You'd have your choice of ad-riddled corporate crap and nothing more. There would be no blogs, no personal servers, no freedom at all. Anything genuinely good would be a rare exception, not the rule. You would be locked out from doing what *you* want to do and forbidden from taking the initiative.
We're at the rising edge of a frightening tide. Governments are forcing federal spyware into the central offices and trunks of the Internet (see: AT&T installing signal splitters and roomfuls of NSA spy computers in main offices). Media corporations are perverting hardware into limiting rather than enabling you with DRM. Microsoft, Intel, and AMD are all playing along with it, putting in DRM at every level. If something isn't done, NOW, it's gonna get seriously bad. Now they want to do a ground-level rebuild of the software running the internet... You expect them not to install corporate and government control throughout if they succeed?
At any rate, this will never happen... There's far, FAR too much intertia behind the current internet. I hope.