National Projects Aim to Reboot the Internet

iron-kurton wrote with a link to an AP story about a national initiative to scrap the internet and start over. You may remember our discussion last month about Stanford's Clean Slate Design project; this article details similar projects across the country, all with the federal government's blessing and all with the end goal of revamping our current networking system. From the article: "No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes. Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was 'generally healthy' because the current technology 'does not satisfy all needs.'"

My connection works just fine

[essence (812715)]

Is this one of those 'forced upgrade' things so hardware and software manufacturers can make a heap of money selling more stuff?

And get ready for a whole heap more IP claims and big corps attempting to own the internet.

Re:My connection works just fine

[TodMinuit (1026042)]

It's worse than that: It's one of those research projects created to justify Ph.D's.

Re:My connection works just fine

[melikamp (631205)]

Well, duh. The way the Internet is right now, there is no way to incorporate or monopolize any particular aspect of it, and that makes some folks very fidgety.

One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.

Yup, some "needs" are just impossible to meet with the Internet in its present state. Like the "need" for a single agency to monitor all Internet traffic. Or the "need" for some folks to control every physical traffic channel. Or the burning need of one familiar industry group to be able to decide unilaterally which computers are "trustworthy" enough to connect to the Web. As it stands, anyone can set up routers, anyone can lay cables and install WAPs, anyone can run a root DNS, an email server, a search portal, or simply host a universally accessible website, etc., etc... What a nightmarish world for a monopolist to live in.

Re:My connection works just fine

[Kamots (321174)]

Where's +1 scary when you need it :(

Re:My connection works just fine

[The_Wilschon (782534)]

Fair enough. Scrolling down the comments, I see a good half dozen highly rated comments that say more or less the same thing as you: Watch out for the corporate and national "security" interests. But here's a different, and perhaps more interesting question:

If they were redoing the internet from scratch, what is wrong with it that ought to be fixed? Can we hear some new-internet wishlists?

The first things I can think of, off the top of my head, are things that are already talked about fairly often: bigger address space (ipv6), and revision to SMTP to make it more difficult to spoof addresses and easier to catch spam.

Re:My connection works just fine

[FrankSchwab (675585)]

It may say something about me, but the first thing I can think of off the top of my head is encrypted traffic. All hosts and all clients are expected to both support and use secure sessions. Sure, there might be a fallback for those underpowered devices that can't support RSA2048, and that's OK, but it should certainly be the exception rather than the rule. Next?

Re:My connection works just fine

[vought (160908)]

Is this one of those 'forced upgrade' things so hardware and software manufacturers can make a heap of money selling more stuff?

Sure.

Let's just rip up the entirety of Interstates 10 and 80 from coast to coast, replacing them with automated super car-like systems because of all the traffic in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

This is a bad idea

[astrashe (7452)]

The Internet is basically fair, because when it was designed no one knew how insanely profitable and important it would be. At the time, no one cared about the net except the people who designed it, so they could do it honestly.

Any new design will inevitably be corrupted by the interests of large companies, and of governments who would feel the need to have their ability to spy on and control traffic protected.

Re:This is a bad idea

[Eravnrekaree (467752)]

I certainly agree with this. I have heard of plans similar to this to force people to upgrade, and at the same time accept DRM loaded software. When we look at this, the current network protocols work just fine. TCP actually works pretty well, its not really something that is TCP does have a few limits built in I believe (i believe it is the window sizes), that might make it a bit limited with extremely high bandwidth connections, but those limits are far from being reached and it is more than adequate for video, audio and other things. New versions of TCP can be developed if needed, and those can be made to work side by side with the older protocols. To say that everything has to be scrapped is just beyond ridiculous, since what upgrades which are needed can be made incrementally and with backwards and forwards compatability. It would be completely wasteful of resources, since most router and equipment actually works pretty well. If needed it can be upgraded, but to say everything has to be thrown own, when it is functioning just fine, is beyond ridiculous. The current internet is working well, and with proper management it will continue to do so.

One of the major problems with IP6 is the lack of really much of an expectation that it will need to interoperate with IPV4 for a very long time. One problem is, no one will upgrade to IPv6 since there are few websites that use it, and since no one is upgrading to IPv6, few websites are inclined to provide it. ISPs, with newer OSs if IPv6 is autoconfiguring, the users computer will automatically configure itself for IPv6. But to expect all ISPs to adopt IPv6, especially before IPv4 address space runs out, is just beyond arrogant. There has to be expected that IPv4 ISPs will be online long after IPv4 address space is maxed out, and IPv4 systems will need to be able to access IPv6 systems coming online then. Ipv6 accessing ipv4 hosts is simple, make ipv4 a subset of ipv6. One of the major problems is IPv4 being able to access IPv6 hosts, new hosts can be given v6 and v4 addresses, but this means that the address space problem has not been solved. But ISPs can be expected to continue using only v4 with some existing users, for some time after v4 address space is exhausted. There are ways for v4 to access v6, through a concerted effort of DNS servers and routers. When a v4 peer askes the local DNS server for a the IP address of a server which is v6 only server, the DNS server will return a fake v4 IP address to the v4 peer, and tell the router (which would have connections to the Ipv6 net) to to route all packets going to that fake IP coming from that v4 peer, to the IPv6 destination, converting the packets to Ipv6 as well. If a IPv4 peer wishes to access a Ipv6 peer by Ipv6 address, a neat trick also using DNS would be used, a special ip6 top level domain would be created, and ipv4 clients could request Ipv6 addresses by specifying ipv6 addresses as subdomains as of this ip6 tld. such as: 2222.2222.2222.2222.2222.2222.ip6 A portion of v4 address space needs to be set aside for this scheme for use for the fake IP addresses. Proxy servers could be provided by ISPs to convert Ipv6 hyperlinks to hyperlinks using the ipv6 tld notation. Newer web browsers could automatically do this for the user if they are on an ipv4 only network. Problem solved! This would require no changes on the user end, and the ISP could even use 6-over-4 to connect their routers to ipv6 networks even if they are not directly connected to an upstream ipv6 provider.

proper management

[falconwolf (725481)]

The current internet is working well, and with proper management it will continue to do so.

That't the problem. The powers that be don't want the internet to work as well as it does. Instead they want to control it.

Falcon

Who's "Internet" are they talking about?

[LoudMusic (199347)]

I don't think any one group can say that we're going to scrap the internet and start over. Hell, the US government couldn't convert its citizens to the metric system and they're the ones that control the measurements. No entity controls the internet and that's what makes it so great. If someone thinks they have a better idea of how it should work let them create their own networks of computers and run their own protocols and standards and we'll see which one the consumers prefer. Probably the one they already have thousands of dollars invested in, are familiar with, and have *freedom* to navigate.

Can anyone reference a national system that was successfully replaced? I heard rumor that a very small country changed which side of the road they drove on in the past ten years. The Internet is a global system - fat chance of any cold turkey changes.

Besides which, lets assume that there is a massive change to the internet. There are plenty of geeks in the world with the knowledge and capabilities to set up their own networks and build an internet of their own. How many of us have wired and wireless internetworks between apartments, dorms, and neighboring houses already? It would just become even more prevalent.

Re:Who's "Internet" are they talking about?

[Eevee (535658)]

I heard rumor that a very small country changed which side of the road they drove on in the past ten years.

The trick was they did a staggered implementation--they had all the truck drivers change to other side first.

I'll be here all week, try the veal.

ISA Has Been Pitching This For Years

[1sockchuck (826398)]

The Internet Security Alliance has been talking openly about an overhaul of core protocols since 2004 [netcraft.com].

"What needs to happen is a profound change in protocols and in implementation," ISA Chairman Bill Hancock said in that 2004 interview. "Getting people to talk about it isn't hard. I've talked to the geeks, I've talked to the executives, I've talked to everyone. It's a total issue of money. The realistic approach is to look at the economic impetus. ... We need some strong, highly-secure protocols, and they've got to be able to last a long time. The problem is that we have 655 million or so users of the Internet right now. Deploying security enhancements to that many users at once is a non-trivial matter. The problem is complex, big and will take a while to solve"

Re:ISA Has Been Pitching This For Years

[grcumb (781340)]

The Internet Security Alliance has been talking openly about an overhaul of core protocols since 2004.

People have been talking about this since 1998. On Halloween [catb.org] of that year, Eric Raymond had several Microsoft internal emails forwarded anonymously to him. They outlined how Microsoft could respond to the Open Source Threat. The single most telling quote runs like this [catb.org]:

"OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."

At the World Wide Web conference in Amsterdam In 2000, Lawrence Lessig spoke clearly about the threat to the principle of the 'end to end' network (i.e. the Internet as designed). At that time he was speaking about the intent of the telcos to subvert it through WAP, but the prophetic nature of his comments are made visible by endeavours such as these.

Make no mistake, folks: the shiny new future that's being laid out for us here will have none of the freedoms that we enjoy today, where access to information is concerned. This is something that needs to be opposed early, loudly and without compromise.

It's like nobody has heard of research anymore...

[Schraegstrichpunkt (931443)]

The Internet won't be replaced this way, but it's still a useful exercise. You spend some money researching the "what if" scenario, get some results you didn't expect, and then you adapt the technology to the existing infrastructure.

Haven't we got something else we could spend $ on?

[BillGatesLoveChild (1046184)]

What a huge waste of money. Sure they could build DRM and WGA and SonOfClipper in at the lowest level, but really, what's in it for the rest of us?

You never know. The guys raising money for this will beat the pr0nography and DRM drum enough that some politicians will be impressed and throw some of (your) money at it. But are they going to convince business and the public for massive retooling costs, when in the end, we'll have something very similar to what we have at the moment.

There are better uses for money. Try Cancer research or something else instead please.

Gradual transition

[suv4x4 (956391)]

We're at a point where total reboot/scrapping of the Internet is as likely as waking up tommorow and finding all of IPv4 scrapped in favor of new shiny IPv6.

There's more loss in scrapping everything and starting over than it is to improve existing solutions in a compatible manner.

Another example: everybody knows the x86 instruction set and interface sucks. It so sucks, that for quite some time AMD and Intel don't produce x86 chips anymore. Have you felt any revolution or "scrapping" going on"? No because all modern chips will take the x86 instructions and translate them internally, so on the outside the chip works with x86 software.

This is how progress works: if something is used massively world-wide, and something sucks about it, expect slow gradual transition, where the offending problems will be tucked away in a compatibility, emulation, translation layer and earth keeps spinning.

A better idea...

[commisaro (1007549)]

I think they should consider replacing the current series of tubes with something that more closely models a big truck. That way I wouldn't have to wait until next Thursday to get an internet from my office.

Complete Anonymity would be a great feature

[Distan (122159)]

The biggest shortcoming of the current internet (to me) is that anonymity wasn't designed in from the ground up.

Hopefully, this "next big thing" will be designed so there is no information (like IP address) that can be used to trace an internet persona to an actual person or geographic area.

Encryption

[KonoWatakushi (910213)]

What is really needed is widespread adoption of encryption; this would prevent the hoards of greedy and evil entities from pushing "solutions" to problems which don't actually exist. The purpose of the network should be to move data, not to enforce policy, or spy on people. Things such as VOIP are recent enough that they should never have even existed in an unencrypted form. At this time, any fundamental redesign of the Internet will likely only make the situation worse.

Thankfully, this is a problem that can be solved at the edges of the network. If you are a developer of a networked application, you should embrace encryption, no matter what you are sending. Only after a significant part of the traffic is encrypted will the Internet truly be an end to end network as it was originally intended. This is a good thing, and is the primary reason why the Internet has flourished to date.

Until then, more and more intelligence will be stuffed into the network, and it will offer no benefit at all to the users of that network. It only serves to further the special interests of large corporations and government, and will continue to be severely abused. It only serves to make the network more expensive, and one thing is for certain; it won't move the data any faster.

Only after this becomes a reality can we really concentrate on making the network faster and better, rather than inventing new ways to squeeze more money out of people for the same crappy infrastructure.

Re:Encompassing?

[TodMinuit (1026042)]

As stated in the whitepaper [stanford.edu]:

Designed over 30 years ago, the success of the Internet is a testament to the foresight of
a handful of visionary researchers. Hundreds of millions of users rely on it for business
and pleasure; and it is now hard to imagine a world without it.

But our reliance on the Internet makes us victims of its success, and vulnerable to its
shortcomings. Some of the shortcomings are self-evident, such as the plague of security
breaches, spread of worms, and denial of service attacks. Even without attacks, service is
often not available due to failures in equipment or fragile routing protocols. And its
behavior is unpredictable making it unsuitable for time-critical applications. Other short-
comings are less obvious: The Internet was designed for computers in fixed locations, and
is ill-suited to support mobile end-hosts; it uses packet-switching making it hard to take
advantage of improvements in optical switching technology; it neither ensures anonymity,
nor facilitates accountability; and the demise and restructuring of most network service
providers suggests that providing network service is not profitable.

In summary, we dont believe that we can or should continue to rely on a network that is
often broken, frequently disconnected, unpredictable in its behavior, rampant with (and
unprotected from) malicious users, and probably not economically sustainable.

I think the last paragraph is disconnected with reality, but the second paragraph makes a good point or two.

Re:Encompassing?

[Doctor Memory (6336)]

the second paragraph makes a good point or two

Yeah, and a bad point or several. "plague of security breaches and spread of worms"? I don't think the internet has had its security breached, or suffers from worms. Unprotected systems may suffer from this, but blaming the internet for it is like blaming the streets for drive-by shootings. And "fragile routing protocols"? IP is the canonical example of a robust routing protocol. If an intermediate node drops off the net, IP will find a new route. It may not always be the best route, but we're discussing fragility, not efficiency. A protocol that routes your packets from New York to Miami via Winnipeg when some backhoe operator takes out the bulk of the fiber between Philadelphia and Washington DC doesn't sounds too "fragile" to me. The fact that it may continue to do this even after the fiber has been restored is unfortunate, but hardly a sign that it is "fragile".

As to the rest of the paragraph, it's just as misguided. When was the last time you weren't able to connect to the internet due to "equipment failures" other than your own CPE? Or the last time you couldn't get to a site because there was no route to it? Personally (and I use the internet every day, and have for the last 7-8 years, just like almost everyone else on this site), I haven't seen it. The only time I get "Cannot connect to site" is when a page tries to access doubleclick, which I have routed to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts. And the only time I couldn't get on due to equipment failure, all I had to do was power-cycle my DSL modem. Oh, and since I implemented a cacheing DNS server, my response time is quick enough that I don't notice if it's variable or "unpredictable" — whether a site responds in 0.1 or 0.6 seconds, it looks the same to me.

This article sounds like propaganda from the Committee for a More Profitable Internet.

Re:Come on, be realistic

[Charcharodon (611187)]

Sure we can, just unplug the main computers and presto, the internet is no more. :)

You are right it'll probably be a second, third or even fourth network. I can see the banks wanting a private network as well as diplomats, and the military, there is no reason why this couldn't be done.

I think the whole 911/999 VOIP "crisis" is overblown, it would be simpler just to make local emergency only cell phones for the home or just have a emergency registration site for the VOIP providers I don't know why so many people are getting worked up over it.

Now as far as setting up a new internet, the trick is to keep quite a few countries outside of the US and the majority of the EU from having a say how things are set up because far too many of them want way too much control over what people can do.

Re:Come on, be realistic

[pedantic bore (740196)]

That's exactly right.

IPv6 addresses many of the current problems. IPv6 is a standard, supported by many vendors. IPv6 plays nicely with IPv4, so you don't have to break the world in order to deploy it. IPv6 has been around for years...

... and IPv6 adoption is negligible.

Seriously, if we can't get people to adopt IPv6, what's the chance that people are going to adopt something more disruptive?

I've seen some of these proposals, and technically they're interesting. From the perspective of getting the market to move in a new direction, things will have to get a lot worse before they're even taken seriously.

Re:Of course the government wants it

[The Master Control P (655590)]

The only reason that the Internet isn't a fascist's wet DRM dream presently is because when it started there was no need (only authorized personnel had access anyway, and the only media was ASCII porn) and by the time they (authoritarians, facists, and control freaks) first realized what was happenning, it was too late.

You better believe that if a new Internet were designed today, it would be another TV: You'd have your choice of ad-riddled corporate crap and nothing more. There would be no blogs, no personal servers, no freedom at all. Anything genuinely good would be a rare exception, not the rule. You would be locked out from doing what *you* want to do and forbidden from taking the initiative.

We're at the rising edge of a frightening tide. Governments are forcing federal spyware into the central offices and trunks of the Internet (see: AT&T installing signal splitters and roomfuls of NSA spy computers in main offices). Media corporations are perverting hardware into limiting rather than enabling you with DRM. Microsoft, Intel, and AMD are all playing along with it, putting in DRM at every level. If something isn't done, NOW, it's gonna get seriously bad. Now they want to do a ground-level rebuild of the software running the internet... You expect them not to install corporate and government control throughout if they succeed?

At any rate, this will never happen... There's far, FAR too much intertia behind the current internet. I hope.