Hey Al Gore: Your Internet's Busted
Fascinating whitepaper report (pdf) over at Stanford University on a proposal to rebuild the internet from scratch. The ad hoc elements that make the internet a marvelous wild west of information are rubbing up against the limits of the infrastructure. Can we do better if we start over? Will the big players let you, even if you do come up with a better idea?
We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet.s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and .backward-compatible. style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network.s ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized by two research questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure", and "How should the Internet look in 15 years." We will measure our success in the long-term: We intend to look back in 15 years time and see significant impact from our program.
