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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."
A series of pipes.
What should the "next internet" be? Wireless. Configuration-less. Always connected. High speed. Low cost. Cross-platform, cross-device, and accessible by even the simplest devices (wristwatch syncing to online time server?). Access/infrastructure not controlled by single corporations.
:)
Ever seen the Ghost in the Shell movies and series? Make that "Net" real.
exactly the same as the old one
except with more high quality Blu-Ray porn of course
Maybe 1985. I want color.
Seriously. How about plain text, maybe a standard color and graphics set, no embedded content, downloadable material only. We could even let the government have their infinite monitoring system. If it were all plain text then there'd be no secret to it. To make encoded binary workarounds undesireable, limit the whole sha-bang to 4800 bps. That'll please the recording industry too. Blank CD sales will go through the roof.
Draw a few lines to keep the network secure. Let the crowd whine and cry that it's too difficult to download a file and open it locally with the appropriate application. Those people never really wanted or needed computers anyway. Let them go back to playing dominos or Yahtzee or something.
Do you realize how many problems we could solve by putting the open network back on the terms that it should never have left?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
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.
Do you realize how many problems we could solve by putting the open network back on the terms that it should never have left?
The OP meant 1984 in an Orwellian sense. Which is much likelier than the scenario you describe.
I dread an overhaul of "The Internet", whatever that even means, because there is no way in hell it would be allowed to be the Wild West that it is today. It would certainly be much more like television or radio in that large corporations would "broadcast" to you and user generated content would be completely on their terms. Gone would be the days where anyone could start up a website about anything; some sort of expensive license would be required and personal pages would be relegated to whatever version of Myspace or Facebook still exists. Anonymity would, of course, be impossible.
The goverment and communications companies were taken by surprise the first time around.. That's not happening again.