What Does the 'Next Internet' Look Like?

Kraisch writes with a link to the Guardian website, which again revisits the subject of reconstructing the internet. This time the question isn't whether it should be done, but what should the goals of a redesign be? From the article: "'There's a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you're talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you're really doing so,' said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. At the moment we are still using very clumsy methods to approach such problems. The result: last year alone, identity theft and online fraud cost British victims an estimated £414m, while one recent report claimed 93% of all email sent from the UK was spam ... Many ideas revolve around so-called "mesh networks", which link many computers to create more powerful, reliable connections to the internet. By using small meshes of many machines that share a pipeline to the net instead of relying on lots of parallel connections, experts say they can create a system that is more intelligent and less prone to attack."

Comments

It looks like

[eviloverlordx]

1984.

Anonymous cowards?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>"'There's a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you're talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you're really doing so,' said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute.

How does that jive with anonymous cowards wanting to keep thier identity hidden?

There is no next.

[clubhi]

This internet fad is about to die. BTW, it's kind of funny how close this is to an article about the next web bubble bursting... It seems like to me we would need a lot of programmers to work on the next internet.

The "new internet"

[Lendrick]

The new internet, if it ever comes to pass, will be designed by governments and large corporations. This will mean the following:

* No more anonymity. You'll need to identify yourself just to get onto the network, and protections will be in place to keep you from hiding behind a proxy. Your computer's unique ID will be registered in your name, and it will be available to the FBI, CIA, and RIAA upon request (no warrant required).

* Large barrier to entry. No more setting up your own server without getting special permission to act as a server. There will be a barrier between servers and clients, and consumers will be second-class citizens in this regard.

* Probably less spam. Tighter controls will make it harder for spammers to get their unwanted traffic into the intertubes. Also, now that it's possible to implement an email tax, email spam could be made prohibitively expensive.

* Better security. Locking the internet down will help somewhat in keeping the criminal element out, because it will (theoretically) be a lot easier to trace where they're coming from.

So, you win some, you lose some. There's a use for this kind of network, but only for secure transactions. I don't think a "new internet" is something that anyone here would want to use.

Privacy concerns

[CaptainPatent]

Wiretapping and privacy concerns are already very prevalent as even at this point in time it isn't outrageously hard to track someone down online unless they are very good at covering tracks. I can't imagine how bad this would be when such information is kept and record as a standard.
I view this much in the same way as why a presidential election is kept as a secret ballot. Much of the information about browsing history and activities can reflect both positively and negatively on your own personal views which one should have the ability to keep private if they wish. In this way we can choose our religious, moral and personal views much more freely and need not tolerate unwarranted persecution.
I just hope this idea isn't being considered too seriously.

encrypted, decentralized p2p network

[lawpoop]

I personally would like to see a decentralized, encrypted p2p network. Using PKI, we could create a system where you send an encrypted email out into the p2p network. It's passed around until it gets to its intended recipient, who has the decryption key. Since it's encrypted, nobody else can read it. Because of the PKI, you can be certain of who sent you the email, that it's really from them, and that nobody intercepted it on its way.

Now instead of just email, change this to any kind of data. Create your own username with a private key, and you can use it to get access to data directed to you on any machine connected to the PKI network.

Want anonymity? Just create another identity.

Re:encrypted, decentralized p2p network

[AnyoneEB]

I think a large part of FreeNet's slowness comes from anonymity being one of its goals. Although it is a good feature, anonymous communications tend to be very slow. In general, I do not think anonymity is required for anonymous communications and a system like FreeNet could be used when necessary, taking the performance it associated with it. I think you could probably design a protocol such that content gets signed so you always know who it is from and then knowing an IP address they have used as well is not a big deal.

Yes

[newr00tic]

Good enough idea, but internet[0] can already do this.

Proceed to shitlist everyone that you've yet to arrange a keyswap with, and enjoy fully encrypted communication.

(--If both parties agree that a bond via electronic communication is 'important enough,' you'll soon see your f[r]iends converted to encryption in an eyeblink..)

Should you wish to 'invite' more people once they turn responsible, you're free to do so.

(Effectivity by using lowest acceptable sanity-denominator.)

It looks like this one:

[ThousandStars]

The "next" Internet looks like this one, except with censorship and less spam.

I'll take the spam.

The "Problem" Is Open Endedness

[CodeBuster]

The trap which the Guardian falls into, and it is a common one among the public, is the notion that because people now use the Internet for certain tasks, which it was not specially designed to accommodate but rather *could* accommodate in a layered approach, that it must be redesigned to carve out special support for tasks which it now coincidentally supports, but may or may not in the future. They forget that among the original design goals of the Internet (the ARPANET rather) was to have the most robust, generic, expandable, and scalable system possible, even at the expense of support for more specific and advanced features which could be built on top of the basic protocols anyway (and they have been). In networking it is not so much what one puts into a protocol, but rather what one judiciously leaves out in order not to limit what can built on top. The basic protocols of the Internet have served us well for over 30 years now and really do need to be changed much if at all. If they want to offer new "services" then they should submit their proposals to W3C and build a special banking layer which clients must support, on top of basic HTTPS, to support the features that they want so that the principle of least knowledge applies. Alas, the principles of good engineering and good software engineering are lost on the consumer society which loves all-in-one devices that do nothing really well and don't force people to think about really *good* solutions.