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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. This is totally redundant, and there's no reason to do it - just like other companies writing operating systems when Windows Vista was being developed.

Wait, bad example...

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet 2.0 and Web 2.0 are different things.

Internet 2.0 - New infrastructure for the net.
Web 2.0 - My web site is shit, filled with AJAX and contains no content.

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?

[mikael]

The internet is built over a series of seven layers - the .

The idea of splitting everything into layers is so that any one system could be changed without having to totally rewrite everything else - if you want to replace your dial-up modem with a wi-fi card, all you have to do is replace the drivers. If your ISP wants to replace their router network with an ATM network that's easily done without affecting you. If someone came along with a better router management protocol, that's easily done.

The original Internet did have redundancy and resistance against breakdown built in. Unfortunately, many network companies found it cheaper simply to route separate logical networks along one connection, rather than have multiple and completely separate connections. Thus, we end up with a hard-wired minimum spanning tree network, that fails as soon as one link goes down.

Let them go ahead with this idea, but by the time they complete their literature survey, they will probably find out there is very little that they need to change.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[bockelboy]

The Internet 2 is a consortium maintains a high-speed backbone across the US; the costs are subsidized by the government so universities can communicate each other at 10Gbps rates without having to go out to the commercial Internet. A small portion of the funding goes to some middleware projects.

However, most NSF-funded networking projects use the I2 as their testbed, but they're not necessarily a part of the I2. For example, GENI - the US effort to redesign internet protocols from the ground up - will run in parallel with I2. GENI is the US counterpart to this Japanese effort (although it's hard to tell from the light-on-details article).

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[Retric]

I know this is /. but did you read the article you linked?

Noting actually uses the OSI model it's just an abstraction to help people understand how networking works. The Internet uses the TCP/IP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP_model model of Application, Transport, Network, and Data link layers.

PS: The internet has redundancy as a mesh of networks even if many of those networks have single point's of failure. On second as you speak with such conviction on subjects you know little about you might belong on /. Welcome to the party.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[somersault]

Yep. The only question is - do you want the network to function like The Matrix, or be more along the lines of Ghost in the Shell?

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[teh_chrizzle]

please explain how can we have any meaningful lock in on the internet, and (assuming this to be possible), please also explain how this would be bad.

i think the parent post is referring vendor lock-in, specifically provider lock in.

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. with all of the shenanigans (filtering, capping, throttling, etc.) that american telcos and cablecos have threatened to pull (or are actively pulling) thanks to the lack of competition in the residential broadband market, perhaps a non-american competitor to the internet as most americans know it is just what the doctor ordered.

with that said, if they really wanted to impress me they would make such a network accessible from the US.

Re:That's good and all, but...

[iamdrscience]

Yes, but unfortunately, because it's Japanese, all genitalia will be censored with mosaic pixelations. :(

Sure, you all laugh at the Japanese

[circletimessquare]

Once upon a time, France had complete domination of network information communication thingies.

France probably laughed too, a big gutteral Gaulic laugh: "Silly Americains, think you can replace the Minitel? I fart in your general direction!"

Replace it with what?

[jollyreaper]

Whatever they replace it with has got to be a) self-aware b) housed in a really cool-looking robotic body c) flail phallic, cybernetic tentacles on command and d) be preoccupied with conquering neighboring nations and cowering schoolgirls. I predict it will be called EcchiNet. Nuclear war and terminator endoskeletons to come later.

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.

Japanese version?

[Yvan256]

The american internet is made of a series of tubes, right? Well, then we can guess that the Japanese version will be a series of tentacles.

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.

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?)