Japanese Researchers Aim to Replace the Internet

Gary writes "Japanese communications minister Yoshihide Suga said Friday that Japan will start research and development on technology for a new generation of network that would replace the Internet, eyeing bringing the technology into commercial use in 2020. The envisaged network is expected to ensure faster and more reliable data transmission, and have more resilience against computer virus attacks and breakdowns."

Comments

Doesn't this already exist?

[morgan_greywolf]

Doesn't this already exist? I mean, seriously, how many parallel projects do we need to do the same thing?

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[MightyYar]

I don't see anything wrong with trying different approaches to the same end. Perhaps they disagree with compromises or design decisions that were made with Internet 2.0?

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[lheal]

Unless they figure out how to ensure redundancy, they will have reinvented the wheel. The reason the Internet is unreliable is that the last two nodes on the graph have only one connection. Why do we have only one ISP, and why do ISPs only have one upstream provider? Economics. Let's see them solve that one.

Furthermore, we've been about to implement IPv6 for years now.

Even furthermore, their ultra-secure shiny modern internetwork will still have to connect to the kludgy 1980's rustbucket the rest of us use on our Windows-based computers, which means it will be pwned in a few minutes just like the original.

It's the Silver Bullet Syndrome. They think they'll invent a secure network, when all they'll be doing is achieving a bit of obsecurity.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[Oswald]

My fear is that it's a perfect example. By 2020, the current internet will have a level of lock-in that makes Windows look disposable. "Faster" and "safer" will have a tough time overcoming "empty".

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[NickFortune]

if you have no real choice in who provides your internet access you have take what they give you or choose to live without internet access.

Point taken. However, that's not a shortcoming of the way the internet is currently designed. If I wanted to get a second phone line, I could open an account with a second ISP and have two gateways into my home LAN. That would take a little more vendor support for the average user, but there's nothing in the current implementation preventing such a usage.

I do appreciate that most areas in the US don't have much in the way of competition between providers (I'm in the UK) and I understand the concern that an ISP monopoly or duopoly may prove just every bit as abusive as a vendor with a widely used proprietary format. But in the ISP case, the flaw is not in the design of the internet itself. Reinventing the infrastructure is not going to solve the anti competitive nature plans of some large carriers, and at best it will only provide a feature that we already have.

perhaps a non-american competitor to the internet as most americans know it is just what the doctor ordered.

mmmm... but how are you going to access it? Unless someone feels like laying dedicated fiber across the Pacific, surely you'd end up accessing it via the Internet anyway? In which case, look for your local ISPs to traffic-shape and/or surcharge it to death before they let it become a viable competitor.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[Kadin2048]

Not to put words in the GP's mouth, but there are a few transport-layer protocols that I've come across which go in different directions from TCP and UDP.

There is a list over at Wikipedia, although I don't know if it's really close to exhaustive.

A lot of them are aiming for some sort of middle ground between TCP and UDP. They want the statelessness of UDP but some of the congestion-control and error correction of TCP, but without having to reinvent the wheel by building their own error-correction on top of UDP on a per-application basis. Others are just low-overhead versions of TCP, which were probably a lot more appealing when network and computing resources were less abundant.

Some other protocols seem like pretty straightforward attempts to patent, proprietize, and replace TCP: e.g. Venturi Transport Protocol. Others seem more well-intentioned, but look like solutions seeking problems, or buzzword-compliant* attempts to please everyone with one product.

The only one that seems particularly interesting is SCTP, which is an IETF proposed standard for a protocol that's similar to TCP but allows the transmission of multiple simultaneous streams of data, within one connection. That seems like it might be useful.

* I couldn't resist quoting this description of XTP, which sounds like it was copied and pasted from a Dilbert strip:

XTP was designed to provide a wide range of communication services built on the concept that orthogonal protocol mechanisms can be combined to produce appropriate paradigms within the same basic framework. Rather than using a separate protocol for each type of communication, XTP's protocol options and control of the packet exchange patterns allow the application to create appropriate paradigms.

Yes, but Ask Slashdot: how much will it cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am glad they are going to replace the Internet, but I wish there was some sort of forum, some sort of blog, where we could discuss how much it would cost to replace the Internet.
Maybe I should submit an Ask Slashdot question. I also have a time machine. 2+2=?

Re:Yes, but Ask Slashdot: how much will it cost?

[morgan_greywolf]

The original cost of building the Internet was doubtlessly in the billions, maybe in the trillions of dollars. But such cost wasn't spent by one entity. The Internet was built with private/public partnerships and building it was a boon to the early computing industry. Entire empires were built with Internet dollars -- think UUNet, BBN, AT&T, Al Gore (kidding!) and others who created the Internet.

My point is that the cost is shared throughout the economy and actually builds wealth instead of destroying it.

Re:Yes, but Ask Slashdot: how much will it cost?

[marcello_dl]

Replacing the internet is not possible. Either everybody switches overnight, or there is a period where these new networking tech/protocols must communicate with the old ones. So they essentially become part of the internet, nevermind it won't share the TCP/IP stack. Besides, a compatibility layer is needed for existing internet apps.

Re:Yes, but Ask Slashdot: how much will it cost?

[Mathonwy]

erm?

Ok, I admit that networking isn't my strongest suit. But... am I missing something? What do you mean "the fact that the internet cannot cope with anything other than ascii"? The internet is just a protocol for routing information from point A to point B. That information is stored in bytes. By all means correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is anything language-specific about those bytes.

Are you confusing "the internet" with "the web"? Web pages do assume (by default at least) an ascii encoding, I believe. But that's not something that needs to be solved by changing the internet, that's something you could fix just by modifying browsers. Which, surprise surprise, is something people have already done. Heck, for that matter, what's up with your original premise, that they want to "have things in a language that they can understand, using characters that appear on their keyboards"? Most Japanese web sites ARE in japanese... Most web browsers DO support unicode encoding...

Are you possibly just talking about the URLs themselves? They don't have unicode support I guess, although that's something that could [I think?] be handled just by supplying a unicode-enabled custom DNS?

Don't get me wrong, research is generally a good thing overall, and as you point out, who knows what useful things they'll come up with along the way. But most of your reasons for why reinventing the internet might be a good idea, ring hollow to me. That, and the tone of your post feels like you have a specific bone to pick with either one of the previous posters, or possibly just with america in general?

Personally, my main concern with a "new" internet is the climate in which it would be born. The current internet had the benefit of being created for non-comercial use in mind, and was deliberately designed with open access in mind. It's structure is deliberately set up in a fairly idealistic way. It has a crazy-low barrier for entry if you want to put something on it. I find it fairly unlikely that a "new" internet would be as open. Corporations in Japan (or America, for that matter) are unlikely to make that mistake again, and given the current environment (again, in both japan AND america) I find it exceedingly unlikely that any new creation on that scale wouldn't be at least partially beholden to corporate interests.

(And yes, I know, our current internet's high-ideal design is steadily eroding before the face of a never-ending series of attempted power grabs by various groups. But at least it's.... taking them longer? At least such attempts are bandaids on an unfriendly design, as opposed to having the whole thing designed to be friendly to corporate control from the get-go?)

Re:Yes, but Ask Slashdot: how much will it cost?

[janrinok]

before it gets translated to their stupid characters

And that is what is wrong at the moment - people like you don't accept that there are other nations, with other languages and alphabets, and with other desires for how the internet develops. For example, changing DNS so that it can cope with other languages would enable other countries to have meaningful names in their URLs. Many of these people cannot read English - nor should they have to. So being able to use their own words, in their own language, using a native keyboard would be a great step forward for them.

Re:Yes, but Ask Slashdot: how much will it cost?

[janrinok]

The 'http://' and '.cn' are not Chinese characters - they are ASCII. I'm not sure how a DNS server in, say, Iceland would cope with receiving URLs written purely in Chinese, Russian, Korean and Arabic. The easy answer is that the current specification requires 'http://' and '.cn' to be written in ASCII. But to many around the world, those characters are as meaningless to them as the Chinese characters are to me. That is why there is still room for the system to be improved so that any language can be used without recourse to ASCII. Doesn't the fact that Slashdot won't even accept the URL underline this point?

hmm

[BuR4N]

In normal cases when you see news like this I would be tempted to say that this is something that will never materalize, but Japan have a trackrecord of going their own way with for example mobilephone networks. WIll be interesting to watch if they getting anywhere with this.

Who's gonna pay for that?

[BibelBiber]

The thing i snobody wants to pay for it. Compare this to the AOL and CompuServe networks that were available for a long time. Competing with the free internet. They don't exist anymore. Just because anybody who owns it can put restrictions on you. It's not gonna work.

Re:Who's gonna pay for that?

[Lumpy]

You are completely ignoring what everyone is thinking.

how much DRM are they gonna shovel onto this thing? The current Internet setup is near perfect because of it's flaws. It is why it took off like a bat out of hell. "fix it" like these researchers and corperations want it and it will be Cable TV. Bland and icky.

They want to shove so much DRM into the internet as well as have all your packets signed by your information, etc...

I have a suggestion for the researchers, give up now, it will be a failure. good god look at how long ipV6 has been around and it is still being ignored. I think I read my 100th article about how we are running out of IP addresses that was worded identically to the one I read in 1999.

Not likely to work

[Sycraft-fu]

The problem that all these people who want to replace things like e-mail or the Internet run in to is the whole thing that makes these technologies great is interoperability. The great thing about the Internet is that you hook in to it anywhere and barring your ISP or government having blocks up, you can talk to everything. You can switch ISPs, areas of the world, devices, etc it all doesn't matter. It's not like we didn't have networks before the Internet, what we didn't have was a network that everyone and everything could work on.

So if you are going to replace it, you have to do it with something that works with the Internet. I am not going to sign on to a new network, no matter how good you say your technology is, if I can't access what's already out there. Of course a big part of what people want to do when creating a new standard is to cut off the problems that the old standard had, and thus it becomes incompatible and thus isn't workable.

I mean the problem with a new e-mail system isn't designing one that's resistant to spam. That's easy. The problem is designing one that is resistant to spam but not incompatible with existing, unsecure, e-mail. You aren't going to get people to switch otherwise. It doesn't do me any good to have a spam proof technology if all the people who need to contact me don't also use that.

Same deal with the Internet at large. I don't care how cool your new network is, if it doesn't provide me with access to everything on the Internet, and give everyone on the Internet access to servers I run, then it really isn't very useful to me.

Really, the Internet, for all its flaws, is here to stay for a long time I think. It's not that we couldn't do better, it's that we aren't willing to redo everything from the ground up and switch over. Same shit with plenty of other things. With modern technology, a HVDC power grid might be a better system than what we have. However that's not what we have, and we aren't going to replace what we do have entirely, so we keep adding to the existing system. The Internet is much harder given that you are talking about a network that spans the whole world (and that you actually can convert AC to DC and back).

It's a nice thought that "Hey, let's just tear down all this crap and rebuild it right, based on the better knowledge we have now," but it usually isn't at all practical in reality.