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.'"
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.
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.
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?
revision to SMTP to make it more difficult to spoof addresses and easier to catch spam.
Any suggestions on blocking spam other than address spoofing? Because I suspect that is not a leading cause of spam. With tens of thousands of zombies sitting on the net, why bother?
For the most part, I don't think spam is the Internet's fault. I think superfluous messages are the cost of ridiculously cheap and convenient communication. Spam a pain, but not worth locking the Internet down to combat it IMHO.
If they were redoing the internet from scratch, [...]
But that's the point. Why would anyone want to rebuild it from scratch,
to "reboot" it? I can make a long list of wishes that could
improve the Internet, like higher speeds, universal access, better
email service, more addresses, better DNS, and so on. And the beauty
of the Internet is just this: we can implement any of these changes whenever we
want and however quickly we need them. We can do these things in a coordinated
manner, over a single month, everywhere in the world, or we can do them
host by host, on an opt-in basis, over a period of ten years.
There is not
a single reason to scrape the whole thing, unless there is a fundamental
problem with the design. And, sure enough, there is such a problem, and
I've outlined it above: no single aspect of the Internet can be effectively
monopolized.
RIAA, for example, can start their own DRM-net tomorrow, no one is holding
a gun to their head. Microsoft can patch Vista to refuse connections to
non-Vista computers. We'll see if that very secure design catches on.
As others have noted, anyone can start using their own non-SMTP email server,
either in isolation or with a bridge to the SMTP world. Anyone who wants
a better Internet can just start with their own server or router and then
spread the word (and people do that already with IPv6 and email, afaik).
Anything more than that is an attempt by a single party to extract more
value at everyone else's expense.
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.
Actually, we've long had other networking protocols that satisfied all these "needs". In fact, pretty much every network ever invented has satisfied them, except for the Internet Protocol.
The reason that IP won was that it's the only one that scales up to the size we have now. If you implement any of those "needs", you restrict your network to a small subset that doesn't violate that "need".
Organizations tend to prefer nice, neat setups that are organized hierarchically and can be monitored and audited. This is very useful for a single organization. But it isn't workable for a universal system. That requires parallel, independent development of the parts. If there's a central authority with local veto power, the system can't grow past what that authority's management can understand.
With any sort of central controlling authority, you can't have the explosion of development that has happened on the Internet. This can only happen if people have a way of developing what they want on their own. We can see this pretty clearly by comparing it the cell-phone system, which has the potential to give everyone full access everywhere and make the Internet look puny in comparison. But it's blocked by being limited to only devices and apps that the cell-phone companies' management approve and permit.
For a "new, improved Internet" to succeed, it must make independent local development easier than the current Internet. If it has any sort of controlling central authority, it will just remain a niche player that can't be adopted by enough people and expand to replace the current Internet.
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.
Didn't you get the memo? They have been warning us for years. Internet cleanup day is near. Make sure you unplug your computer. If you don't, everything will be deleted, haven't you heard?
Forward this on to everyone in your address book. This is serious stuff!
Now maybe we can finally get some regulation, control and respect for authority around here.
And install some methods for ferreting out terrorists and music pirates.
Ein Welt, Ein Furher, Ein Internet.
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.
Damn right. Corporates and governments are eating themselves up inside now for that mistake. They would never have allowed it to come to this. It is way too open and uncontrollable by those in power and this can't be allowed.
That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is historically accurate.
There were many "locked down" information networks available for people to connect to before the Internet got popular. Like Compuserve, AOL, and others. For a period, the Internet was in direct competition with these big online information services (as were smaller bulletin board systems).
The Internet won because it wasn't controlled.
So any new Internet that tries to compete with the now Internet surely must be as free.
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.
Even having ipv6 installed can break applications, a lot of older C/C++ code (optomistically) used a pointer to a single element when querying the O/S for installed protocols. It has always been possible to have more than one protocol structure returned by the O/S but it was practicaly unheard of before ipv6, when it started appearing quite a few bugs came out of the woodwork.
More than that, and it has been said already, is the "QoS", which is in part a hidden "Pay for better service". Internet is fair enough, differentiation of services will become the future social discrimination.
Other than that, if they plan to change for good reasons, nice. However, among all the protocols, what would prevail if is not a corporation based one? Would Vista come with SCTP or XCP support in the case they decide to change transport protocols?
Maybe technology will take part, but as usual mone
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.
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"
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 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.
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.
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.
On the contrary, it would be an awesome use of money for the
folks like MS, **IA, and Bells who stand to benefit hundredfold if they assert
complete control over some aspect of the Internet.
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.
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.'"
If the internet could get a brand new start from scratch, they would just fuck it up worse than it already is. We would get built in key escrow, built in DRM, built in centralized eavesdropping, built in censoring functions, etc.
And there would be unforeseen side-effects. I don't mean the easily foreseeable abuse-of-power kinds of side-effects, I mean the exploitation of such fascist features by the criminal element who today does things like spam and run bot-nets.
We would end up with a marginal improvement in performance, a huge loss of individual freedoms and equal or worse levels of personal risk and annoyance.
I wondered how long it would take before the topic of re-designing the Internet started making general rounds.
No one really owns it, and governments can't really control it. How long did we think that would last? I'm sure there are plenty of true benefits that would emerge, but we all know what we will really end up with is a DRM infested wiretap paradise that only serves the financial interests of corporations and the control aims of governments. Mind you, whether its an incremental upgrade or a complete replacement I think these aspects of the Internet will become inevitable - it's just a question of how long it will take.
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.
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.
... I saw a HD TV. I forget who the exhibitor was but, IIRC it was analog composite video, 1024 interlaced, 4x5 aspect ratio. Both the TV and camera were enormously expensive, but I remember thinking I would have one in just a few years and I couldn't wait for the standards to be revised so it could be brought to market. It took 30 years for me to have something comparable.
Truly. For years we've had governments and other special interests clamoring for change because they fear the digital age. In part due to this, we've lost more and more freedoms while the sheeple of the world are led by the ring in the nose ( which they are not even aware of ) into believing that everything is ok; Nothing going wrong here.
So let them redo the internet into a new corporate-friendly version. Let them rape us six ways from sunday. After working in the industry as I have, I could just as easily walk away and leave it to other more patient and gullible folks to handle.
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.
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.
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.
IP is the canonical example of a robust routing protocol. If an intermediate node drops off the net, IP will find a new route.
Actually, IP is not a routing protocol, and will not find new routes. This task is performed by routers, talking over specialized routing protocols to forward routing updates to each other. Examples of routing protocols are OSPF and BGP. Note that these protocols run on top of IP, but that does not make IP a routing protocol.
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.
I think you're being a little optomistic in thinking that the US doesn't want to control what people can do. Given enough time i'd pretty much expect the internet to become the christianet if it was just up to the US.
Instead I think the entire thing should be organised by Yukoslavia, not because they'll be neutral about it, but because they never get a turn at having way too much power.
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.
This has already been done, many times over. In the dense financial areas, banks connect to other banks with dedicated lines. Remember the Internet was all about bridging many of these smaller private networks. (Thus the term internetworking.) And when you're trying to connect sites that are physically distant, you can leverage the existing internet infrastructure to connect them without having to run dedicated lines, creating a Virtual Private Network.
All in all the physical core of the internet is pretty much agnostic to the type of data that goes through it. The Internet as we experience it could change quite radically without much impact on the way the core operates. Even if you create a "new" capital-I Internet, chances are it's going to have to be routed through the lowercase-i internet at some point, though you'll probably never notice.
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.
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.
My connection works just fine (Score:5, Insightful)
And get ready for a whole heap more IP claims and big corps attempting to own the internet.
Re:My connection works just fine (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:My connection works just fine (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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Re:My connection works just fine (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My connection works just fine (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:My connection works just fine (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:My connection works just fine (Score:4, Interesting)
For the most part, I don't think spam is the Internet's fault. I think superfluous messages are the cost of ridiculously cheap and convenient communication. Spam a pain, but not worth locking the Internet down to combat it IMHO.
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Re:My connection works just fine (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's the point. Why would anyone want to rebuild it from scratch, to "reboot" it? I can make a long list of wishes that could improve the Internet, like higher speeds, universal access, better email service, more addresses, better DNS, and so on. And the beauty of the Internet is just this: we can implement any of these changes whenever we want and however quickly we need them. We can do these things in a coordinated manner, over a single month, everywhere in the world, or we can do them host by host, on an opt-in basis, over a period of ten years. There is not a single reason to scrape the whole thing, unless there is a fundamental problem with the design. And, sure enough, there is such a problem, and I've outlined it above: no single aspect of the Internet can be effectively monopolized.
RIAA, for example, can start their own DRM-net tomorrow, no one is holding a gun to their head. Microsoft can patch Vista to refuse connections to non-Vista computers. We'll see if that very secure design catches on. As others have noted, anyone can start using their own non-SMTP email server, either in isolation or with a bridge to the SMTP world. Anyone who wants a better Internet can just start with their own server or router and then spread the word (and people do that already with IPv6 and email, afaik). Anything more than that is an attempt by a single party to extract more value at everyone else's expense.
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Re:My connection works just fine (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, we've long had other networking protocols that satisfied all these "needs". In fact, pretty much every network ever invented has satisfied them, except for the Internet Protocol.
The reason that IP won was that it's the only one that scales up to the size we have now. If you implement any of those "needs", you restrict your network to a small subset that doesn't violate that "need".
Organizations tend to prefer nice, neat setups that are organized hierarchically and can be monitored and audited. This is very useful for a single organization. But it isn't workable for a universal system. That requires parallel, independent development of the parts. If there's a central authority with local veto power, the system can't grow past what that authority's management can understand.
With any sort of central controlling authority, you can't have the explosion of development that has happened on the Internet. This can only happen if people have a way of developing what they want on their own. We can see this pretty clearly by comparing it the cell-phone system, which has the potential to give everyone full access everywhere and make the Internet look puny in comparison. But it's blocked by being limited to only devices and apps that the cell-phone companies' management approve and permit.
For a "new, improved Internet" to succeed, it must make independent local development easier than the current Internet. If it has any sort of controlling central authority, it will just remain a niche player that can't be adopted by enough people and expand to replace the current Internet.
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Re:My connection works just fine (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:My connection works just fine (Score:5, Funny)
Forward this on to everyone in your address book. This is serious stuff!
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Re:My ownership works just fine (Score:4, Insightful)
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Tubes (Score:4, Funny)
Cancel/Allow (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Do you want to restart the Internet now?
[ Restart Now ] [ Restart Later ]
Re:Cancel/Allow (Score:4, Funny)
Two minutes later:
Changes have been made to the Internet and it needs to be restarted.
Do you want to restart the Internet now?
[ Restart Now ] [ Restart Later ]
Lather, rinse, repeat...
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THANK GOD!!! (Score:4, Funny)
This is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Another way to look at it is historically accurate.
There were many "locked down" information networks available for people to connect to before the Internet got popular. Like Compuserve, AOL, and others. For a period, the Internet was in direct competition with these big online information services (as were smaller bulletin board systems).
The Internet won because it wasn't controlled.
So any new Internet that tries to compete with the now Internet surely must be as free.
Re:This is a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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proper management (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
FalconParent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Other than that, if they plan to change for good reasons, nice. However, among all the protocols, what would prevail if is not a corporation based one? Would Vista come with SCTP or XCP support in the case they decide to change transport protocols?
Maybe technology will take part, but as usual mone
Who's "Internet" are they talking about? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The currency of 13 European nations.
ISA Has Been Pitching This For Years (Score:5, Informative)
"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: (Score:3, Funny)
I recommend bittorrent.
Re:ISA Has Been Pitching This For Years (Score:5, Insightful)
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]:
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.
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It's like nobody has heard of research anymore... (Score:5, Insightful)
Haven't we got something else we could spend $ on? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Haven't we got something else we could spend $ (Score:3, Insightful)
Gradual transition (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Some 'needs' I can do without... (Score:3, Insightful)
And there would be unforeseen side-effects. I don't mean the easily foreseeable abuse-of-power kinds of side-effects, I mean the exploitation of such fascist features by the criminal element who today does things like spam and run bot-nets.
We would end up with a marginal improvement in performance, a huge loss of individual freedoms and equal or worse levels of personal risk and annoyance.
Inevitability (Score:4, Insightful)
I wondered how long it would take before the topic of re-designing the Internet started making general rounds.
No one really owns it, and governments can't really control it. How long did we think that would last? I'm sure there are plenty of true benefits that would emerge, but we all know what we will really end up with is a DRM infested wiretap paradise that only serves the financial interests of corporations and the control aims of governments. Mind you, whether its an incremental upgrade or a complete replacement I think these aspects of the Internet will become inevitable - it's just a question of how long it will take.
Rebooting the Internet (Score:3, Funny)
A better idea... (Score:5, Funny)
Complete Anonymity would be a great feature (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
At an IEEE convention in 1976 ... (Score:4, Funny)
Fine by me (Score:4, Insightful)
So let them redo the internet into a new corporate-friendly version. Let them rape us six ways from sunday. After working in the industry as I have, I could just as easily walk away and leave it to other more patient and gullible folks to handle.
Encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the last paragraph is disconnected with reality, but the second paragraph makes a good point or two.
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Re:Encompassing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
This article sounds like propaganda from the Committee for a More Profitable Internet.
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Re:Encompassing? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, IP is not a routing protocol, and will not find new routes. This task is performed by routers, talking over specialized routing protocols to forward routing updates to each other. Examples of routing protocols are OSPF and BGP. Note that these protocols run on top of IP, but that does not make IP a routing protocol.
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Re:Come on, be realistic (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Come on, be realistic (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead I think the entire thing should be organised by Yukoslavia, not because they'll be neutral about it, but because they never get a turn at having way too much power.
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Re:Come on, be realistic (Score:4, Informative)
All in all the physical core of the internet is pretty much agnostic to the type of data that goes through it. The Internet as we experience it could change quite radically without much impact on the way the core operates. Even if you create a "new" capital-I Internet, chances are it's going to have to be routed through the lowercase-i internet at some point, though you'll probably never notice.
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Re:Come on, be realistic (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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.
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Re:Of course the government wants it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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