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Who Will Fix the Internet? No One, Apparently
blackbearnh writes "It seems like everyone focuses on the latest and greatest killer Internet applications, but the underlying infrastructure that all of them run on is showing its age. That's the claim made by a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor. IPv4 is relatively ancient, and even stalled improvements like IPv6 aren't significant enough to matter, according to some researchers. With no one 'in charge' of the Internet, it's almost impossible to get any sweeping technical improvements made, especially since there's no financial incentive on the part of the ISPs and telecoms to invest in basic infrastructure. CalTech Professor John Doyle puts it this way: 'To the extent I've been working in this field for the last 10 years, I've been mostly working on band-aids. I'm really trying to get out of that business and try to help the people, the few people, who are really trying to think more fundamentally about what needs to be done.'"
...is it s diffuse and decentralized nature, a network of networks, not a single network. An organization or individual with the power to "fix" the internet would have the power to destroy it or lock it down.
Another ridiculous article. Supply will always follow demand. WHo will fix the internet? It doesn't matter, it will always be there as long as there is a demand.
The existing internet certainly has its rough edges, and they are not insignificant; but an alarming number of proposed "internet fixes" and "new improved internet" proposals seem to be more about serving the interests of incumbents(largely in the areas of surveillance and copyright enforcement) than about making the internet work better.
Many of the internet's virtues are a result of the fact that it grew up before anybody outside of a narrow circle knew that it was going to be significant, so its development was relatively uncrippled. We aren't going to have that opportunity again. Any "new internet" proposal is going to have the grubby claws of "stakeholders" all over it.
It seems to me that most of the country is still in a situation where there are one or two options for high speed internet in any given area (only one here). If we allowed more competition, we would probably see a rush to upgrade infrastructure, as most people are damn tired of this "large pipe, limited download" crap, and the first ISP to offer either no cap or really high cap and maintain fast speeds is going to take every last customer from crappy services like AT&T.
Having some centralized organization handle network upgrades will work out about as well as it did in the 90's, ie not at all. They'll just pocket the money and continue to clamp down on their customers. The only way to improve service is to increase competition.
I'm afraid the powers that be, will be the ones 'in charge' of the New and Improved internet, and can bet your sweet ass, they won't make the mistakes they did last time that leaves them without total control.
Their corporate masters, will force them to have severe control on what content can be pumped over it, pretty much necessitating control on what can connect to it (so much for having control of your computer), and the govt. and lawyers will certainly make it where you can't be anonymous, and you will likely need a special license to publish on it.
Personally? No thanks, with all its bugs and problems, and tons of cruft out there, I'll be happy to stick with the current internet system that is out there. I like the idea that I can hook a computer on it, and instantly become a peer with any other computer out there, no matter if it is a farm kid on dial up, or a massive corporation's data center. My box/server is equal, and I can do and publish damned near anything I want.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The only conclusion that I can draw from the silence on the actual upgrade is that it's something we wouldn't like.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I fail to see how/why the TFA is lumping everything under one problem called the "Internet". Break it up into little bits, and you'll see that there *are* mostly effective working groups and vendor coalitions solving issues, up and down the stack, every day.
body massage!
The problem correlates to what makes the Internet so successful: it's a wide-open, essentially unregulated space.
With no centralized authority, you get benefits like anonymity (see how long that lasts once the bureaucrats get their hooks in it--oh noes! the terrorists! think of the children! we must track each user), innovation (in just a few years we've gone from hypertext to graphical MMORPGs--I can just see trying to get the paperwork through on that one) and freedom (I don't suppose the good people at 760 United Nations Plaza would be interested in protecting the freedom of expression of fascists, for instance).
Of course, with anonymity comes spam, with innovation you get new and better malware, and with freedom you get a lot of crazy talk. But unless you're ready to throw the baby out with the bath water, it's probably best to leave well enough alone. Since politicians of all stripes are essentially unable to understand opportunity costs or unintended consequences, I shudder each time I read one of these FUD-o-thons.
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If there was someone "in charge" of the internet, we wouldn't be worried about being unable to change technical standards by proclaimed fiat, but instead about why we were using both ancient and nearing unworkable technical standards, and why we were unable to even apply band-aids to the problem, lest the ship be rocked, incompatibilities result, special interests slighted, and the status quo in danger of coming out of stasis.
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Actually I would think that file sharing is the biggest part of the traffic, followed by porn.
What do you think a large slice of file sharing consists of?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Yeah, bandaids until you need a cast, casts until you have a bone replacement. We seem to be at an early cast type of phase.
Some of the "problems with the Internet" are not technical problems so much as social, legal, and financial ones.
SPAM would be an example - except that today's legal approach has failed catastrophically to address the issue. The US has a weak "you can spam" act, and the UK is worse (Spam can only be stopped, one spammer to spammee "information" flow at a time, starting from the second message any given spammer sends to any given recipient). But the problem is not IP. Nor is the problem, fundamentally, that anonymous virtually-free email is possible (it is a system that has many important benefits - from global accessibility, to anonymity). The problem is unscrupulous users who exploit the internet by sending spam.
The Network Neutrality debate is driven by under-investing ISPs who want to run an under-resourced cheap network, and split it into many segmented markets, where they can charge each separate segment as much as it will bear without going into bankruptcy. This will fossilise current usage models of the network, and be a huge barrier to innovation.
Many of today's security "problems of the Internet" are no more Internet problems than mugging or burglary are a problem with streets. The real problem is undetected criminals, and insecure computers and protocols.
Most of these issues either are being addressed - or can be addressed without "fixing" the Internet.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
In fact, I think you both are forgetting SPAM...
The adoption of a new technology is generally not driven by those who dominate once it is widespread. It tends to be driven by early adopters, who are willing to spend the money to try out a new technology. They either prove it, or they have tons of problems. As soon as somebody proves a technology is viable, a business shmuck at some large company can make a successful pitch that "This is the future, etc, etc...and it's already proven technology so the company doesn't have to worry about hiccups, etc, etc".
That is why Porn killed Betamax. Not because Porn represents a large market share, but because Porn was willing to be an early adopter of VHS. They proved that video sales and rental via VHS was viable. Once that happened, the major video players we unwilling to take a bet on Betamax, no matter how superior it was, because they looked at the Porn industry and saw that VHS was already in use, and therefore, the business plan and technical hurdles were done for them, guaranteed.
"The GPL is viral by design, like any good religion."
And, most importantly
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Working fine here. All this talk of "fixing" is just a way to control what should not be controlled. Let the demons roam free, and the angels mingle in the muck. The global connection project has succeeded. Now some would like to see it fail, or stop working so well. Beware...
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
* NAT prevents direct attacks on Internet- connected machines
* NAT prevents snooping of internal network structures
You misspelled "firewall"
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
>>>It tends to be driven by early adopters,
Correct. That was Hollywood movie rentals back in the 70s, and TV websites (like scifi.com) and stores (like amazon.com) in the 90s that were the early adopters. Not porn, which although present, also exaggerates their influence the same way they exaggerate the size of their body parts. ;-)
Of course if you think I'm wrong, then please provide some PROOF (i.e. numbers) to show that we owe the porn industry for the VHS and dot-com boom. Good luck. As with typical urban legends (like the guy waking-up in a bath and no kidneys), you won't find anything to back it up because it never happened.
>>>unwilling to take a bet on Betamax, no matter how superior it was
Yet another myth. Betamax and VHS have identical specs - 3 megahertz luma bandwidth (250 lines horizontal resolution) and 0.4 megahertz chroma bandwidth and 20-20,000 Hi-Fi sound. The only place they were not identical was Betamax's paltry 1-hour record limit, while the first VHS decks could do either 2 or 4 hours. From the point-of-view of the consumer 4 is a hell of a lot better than 1, especially if you want to record Monday night's football game.
Even later when Sony realized their mistake and extended Betamax's record time to 5 hours, it still couldn't match VHS' maximum 10.5 hour length. It was the battle over time that made VHS win consumer loyalty.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
IPV4 addresses will be exhausted at a time according to the following formula:
Wiggabu + 18 months
where Wiggabu represents the time you are currently reading this equation.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I echo the sentiments of the majority of the posts that do not want any more central authority than already exists on the internet. But the problem of shrinking IPv4 address pool will be fixed as the IPv6 address pool starts getting utilized more. Dear Uncle Sam here in the U.S. already mandates that all network capable devices sold to the Federal Government be IPv6 capable. So when they are ready to take the plunge, they can do so fairly quickly. Many commercial entities are also doing the same. So with more IPv6 addresses being used, the take rate on IPv4 addresses will level off, then actually reverse and more addresses will be available. With IPv4 encapsulation, many of the IPv4 devices can be allowed to be purged on their natural cycles, eliminating the need for any mass purge of older devices. I think this is a tempest in a teacup and there is probably nothing to see here. Keep movingâ¦
Much like the transportation industries, adding new safety gear after a huge loss of life, the network is still based on capitalist concerns.
Ever wonder why there are places in America without cellphone coverage? It's because, in a zone where not even ONE phonecall will happen for 10 years, there's zero financial reason to invest the money: it won't nearly pay for itself, and it'll likely go unused for the term, until it needs updating. So what's the point?
In the ISP business, things are kinda cut-throat. If there's no force to make them do it, it won't get done. There are tight margins in this business.
Remember the 286? People cheered: "Hurray for protected mode!" (or was it real mode?) But no one wrote an OS for it for a long time. It's why the 386 was created, so it could switch between modes. Those modes were unarguably better: it just required a need.
So don't expect someone to write a standard for the internet and just have them follow it voluntarily. Remember how .com was for commercial entities, .org for organizations and .net were intended for ISPs? How long did that last?
When we start to run out, it'll be the hot ticket to get on IPv6. It's unarguably better. But since most people deal with the mediocrity of Windows there's no pressure to make the move. One person in 500 even knows what this is. Don't worry: it'll come.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
I don't really care if my joke is factually accurate but if you're going to be so gung-ho demanding proof that you're wrong (you have at least two such posts in this thread), you should probably have some sort of evidence lined up proving that you're right.
Well there are 2 links to respond to them at the bottom of every page; labeled "Feedback" and "Contact Us." Certainly they're not like Slashdot where they're mostly commentary, but then not every site can be nor should be. You could, though, submit a Christian Science Monitor article to Slashdot and probably start a quite good discussion.
As for their articles often being rants, I'll sometimes think someone is ranting when I disagree with them. Often articles are written for people whom are informed, whom bring to the article a background of knowledge about the subject and the world and can thus absorb differing perspectives or interpretation of facts, or even rants. News articles are just that, new articles about familiar and occasionally unfamiliar events; they're not the be-all end-all last statement.