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.'"

Comments

Re:Encompassing?

[TodMinuit]

As stated in the whitepaper:

Designed over 30 years ago, the success of the Internet is a testament to the foresight of
a handful of visionary researchers. Hundreds of millions of users rely on it for business
and pleasure; and it is now hard to imagine a world without it.

But our reliance on the Internet makes us victims of its success, and vulnerable to its
shortcomings. Some of the shortcomings are self-evident, such as the plague of security
breaches, spread of worms, and denial of service attacks. Even without attacks, service is
often not available due to failures in equipment or fragile routing protocols. And its
behavior is unpredictable making it unsuitable for time-critical applications. Other short-
comings are less obvious: The Internet was designed for computers in fixed locations, and
is ill-suited to support mobile end-hosts; it uses packet-switching making it hard to take
advantage of improvements in optical switching technology; it neither ensures anonymity,
nor facilitates accountability; and the demise and restructuring of most network service
providers suggests that providing network service is not profitable.

In summary, we dont believe that we can or should continue to rely on a network that is
often broken, frequently disconnected, unpredictable in its behavior, rampant with (and
unprotected from) malicious users, and probably not economically sustainable.

I think the last paragraph is disconnected with reality, but the second paragraph makes a good point or two.