Researchers Scheming to Rebuild Internet From Scratch 254
BobB writes "Stanford University researchers have launched an initiative called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. The project aims to make the network more secure, have higher throughput, and support better applications, all by essentially rebuilding the Internet from scratch. From the article: 'Among McKeown's cohorts on the effort is electrical engineering Professor Bernd Girod, a pioneer of Internet multimedia delivery. Vendors such as Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and NEC are also involved. The researchers already have projects underway to support their effort: Flow-level models for the future Internet; clean slate approach to wireless spectrum usage; fast dynamic optical light paths for the Internet core; and a clean slate approach to enterprise network security (Ethane).'"
Sounds great... (Score:2, Insightful)
What are the odds (Score:5, Insightful)
anonymity vs. accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the most interesting criteria for a new internet, to me, was criteria #7:
Support anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems true anonymity is becoming more and more important, and less and less available, as governments snoop more on the internet.
Re:Won't work IMO (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to know how they're going to avoid the second system effect with their new internet. One of the big reasons the Internet works is because a lot of effort was spent in keeping everything reasonably simple. Time has shown that anything that start out highly complicated tends to be only very slowly adopted, if at all. IP may have terrible security but at least it doesn't require someone 10 man-years to build a fully compliant router.
Hasn't this been tried before? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who's In Charge? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hasn't this been tried before? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, a great many projects that aim to "start from scratch" don't really make it. However, it's often the case that starting from scratch enables people to think about solutions from a fresh perspective, without all their old assumptions. Even if the actual "from scratch" product never really comes about, or if it comes about and is unsuccessful, often the solutions and the fresh insight creep into the old legacy systems' updates.
Oh yeah, we really need this :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's get the guys that designed all those "wonderful" networks:
Oh yeah, let's get the "EXPERTS" involved!
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Clean Slate vs. Gummed-upTubes (Score:5, Insightful)
Rebuild the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets rebuild the internet because it uses too much open source software and we are not making enough money. I know! Lets get all the vendors together and rebuild it using proprietary crud so that it is impossible for any of these "open source" guys to make server platforms that are freely available.
Lets kill open standards too, because well....who needs those IETF guys anyway! They are just a bunch hippies!
Seriously, though. The internet works better than my cell phone does.
It doesn't need "fixing".
It just needs a few upgrades.
IPV6 would be a nice place to start!
GAD.
The thought of CISCO having a hand in anything the future internet could be makes me want to quit my current network manager job and open an Italian Restraunt.
-gc
-hack
Re:anonymity vs. accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, unless you want this to be a tool only for and by the government, you've got to get businesses comfortable with it. Banks. Retailers. Airlines. Anonymity (of the you-can't-track-my-pr0n-use, or the posting-as-a-troll, or the PRC-can't-ID-the-rebel variety) is antithetical to trustworthy transactions, and without money changing hands, the plumbing is WAY less useful to the huge swaths of the economy that would fund (indirectly) the growth and adoption of such a thing.
"Where prudent" and "as necessary" etc., are completely subjective. People who like to rip off movies have one set of priorities, and people who administer your payroll or need to transmit your cancer meds prescription are looking at it from a very different perspective.
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunatly, I'm afraid they will make it more censorable, more business oriented vs. regular people, less anonymous, more regulated, govt/UN controlled, politically correct...and as someone mentioned, full DRM support forever.
Frankly, for all its faults, I like the internet now as it is...kind of the 'wild west' of information. That just has to 'kill' some of those in power around the world.
I think the last thing we want to do, is recreate it, now that those in power know what free flow of information can do...
Re:This reminds me of Meskimen's Law... (Score:4, Insightful)
In theory, ten years of computer science research might have produced a better design for the internet than the one we have today, back when it was first being developed. However, we have learned a lot from the scale-up that on a practical level would be fairly hard to duplicate in a research setting. Sometimes you just don't think of the possible consequences until you see them happen, particularly things due to human beings TRYING to bring down the system. Think about how long telnet lasted, for example.
In all honesty, it's a miracle the world wide web has scaled the way it has - consider the original scope of the military networks and the small amounts of data they were transmitting. The original designs were to Get Something Working and Justify Our Budget - that's how it has to work. I'd say the return on investment for the various stages of the internet has always more than justified even the costs of redoing it. Sometimes you can't wait to figure out how to do it right, because that will take too much time and what you can build NOW is still useful. Think about automobiles - 10 years from now we will undoubtedly be building better ones than we can build today, but the costs of waiting until we know how to do it "right" are much higher than the costs of replacement.
Now, of course, the question of knowing how to do something right is distinct from doing correctly what we already know how to do - one is a research problem, one is an implementation problem. I'm inclined to think that the web is more of a research limitation than a "do it right" issue, although I could be wrong - it depends on how much was known in the beginning states.
hey, lets revive DECnet Phase V! (Score:3, Insightful)
(and it got about as much attention as ipv6. they both planned for 'big networks' but we all know how popular OSI is, in the real world...)
Re:What are the odds (Score:5, Insightful)
The flip side is that some of your suggestions can have detrimental effects too:
In other words, better support for introducing favoritism between ISPs and content providers, so that (for example) AT&T can extort money from Google and shut down BitTorrent. No thanks; I prefer the "dumb," route-everything-equally, neutral Internet we have now.
And much better protection against free speech, anonymity, etc. Again, no thanks.
Yeah, that "somebody" being AT&T or Microsoft, who would undoubtedly screw it up with Treacherous Computing, built-in "micropayment" toll booths, and assorted other bullshit. Still sound like a great idea?
Re:Rebuild the Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The issues with the existing structure have already been addressed (IPv6, regardless of adoption rate), so I don't see what advantage there is to further development when we don't even have an idea yet what needs to be fixed.
Nice try, but you are a little late (Score:2, Insightful)
-port all known software/libs to use the new protocols
-get all vendors of networking equip to issue major firmware upgrades to switches/hubs/firewalls anything that speaks on the network.
-rewrite networking code for top 6 most popular OS's.
-finally port IOS, JunOS, on all the last hardware models of the last 10 years.
then you might be ready to actually implement something, that is of course if you can then talk a good percentage of the planets ISP/Corp/home users to actually upgrade everything for you.
Case in Point: IPv6
It has been around for a decade. it has been ported and deployed onto most major platforms. There is even app and NAT translators on the routers to ease you into it. There is a well known and defined migration path. The US Govt has mandated migration to IPv6 by 2009 (I think).
And you *still* cant get people/corps to start the migration.
We already have a internet, small incremental changes (MPLS,IPv6) are barely tolerated as long as its super easy and you have a big gain.
start from scratch? you are a little late for that.
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Wild West" exists (and perhaps always has existed) mostly in fiction.
In history it begins with the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and ends in 1876 at the Little Big Horn. The Last Stand for the Plains Indians as well as for Custer.
It's a brief moment in time - and, in some ways, a pattern of settlement unique to the United States.
It shouldn't surprise anyone if the Internet frontier has it's own ending.
Re:Hasn't this been tried before? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's success/failure is not even remotely comparable to OS/2 or the Itanium... get a clue!
Content Management (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:3, Insightful)
A rewrite/new tech doesn't always mean real-life solution. See OGG vs. MP3.
Re:What are the odds (Score:4, Insightful)
A new Internet economics. A worse Internet. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Outrageous! The rich treated the same as the poor!" They want an internet in which a porn movie downloaded by a CEO preempts and disturbs a critical communication from a hospital to an investigation center.
The internet as we have it is an open field. A dumb, simple, protocol so that people can innovate in the sides. This enabled us to be independent from ISP and to design new protocols (Gnutella, Bittorrent, etc.). Of course, they now say that this "dumbness" produced lack of innovation:
It's not clear to me how having a more complex internet in the middle will be able to ease its growth. It seems as the opposite, as more complex middleware will be more complex to upgrade and setup. In fact, the main reason the current internet has "ossificated" *is* dumbness in the middle, but other kind of dumbness. The commercial companies' dumb administrators, dumb managers, who didn't care to provide us multicast, IPv6, mobile ip, IPsec, etc.
The Internet as we have it could never had happened if it were for the private sector. It's too open, private companies don't like standards. See how the classical internet infrastructure got frozen when the commercial companies took over internet in the last century. HTTP, IMAP, POP, HTML, etc. got stuck in their last versions. It's because Internet needs a strong *public* presence. Companies can exist, provide service, but Internet needs a strong presence by the people (in the form of the state..? Universities? I don't know...)
This group is not aiming at a better, utopic, internet. They are trying to recapture what they've lost when their CCITT (X.25, X.400, X.500) network wreck.
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, the idea of rebuilding the internet is a load of bull. The article lists a bunch of things you supposedly can't do with regular protocols, and takes those as reasons for change. They seem to think we can't do multicast, QOS, or security with current protocols. They also seem to think that, since wireless is so different from land lines, we should need new protocols. Their plans also happen to destroy any possibility of network neutrality.
I sincerely hope this project doesn't get any government funding.
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This reminds me of Meskimen's Law... (Score:1, Insightful)
The internet is based on a handful of up-front designs, which *were* in fact based on extensive computer science research as well as a clear understanding of planning and systems analysis (which you don't learn from world of warcraft, btw). TCP/IP, HTML, SMTP etc were all basically correct and usable at their first iteration. Some fixes have been needed, but most of the changes have just been bells and whistles of dubious value, quality and inter-operability. More like "decremental development" in fact.
Wanna know why the internet, and software in general, is in such a poor state? Because it's being developed decrementally by gamers and haxors and the real engineers don't get a look in any more.
Re:The Six Million Dollar 'Net. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that doesn't help those in governments where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can get you locked up without a trial. Similar things have happened to a couple American citizens (and people unfortunate enough to have been noticed by the American administration, accidentally or otherwise) in America. Your innocence is only a protection if those who would persecute you need to prove your guilt. It does nothing when you are never even given the chance to prove your innocence.
Agreed, but in order for there to be compromise, those who have to follow the rules should be given equal voice to those who want to set the rules. When laws are being made by people who know little about the subject matter (a series of tubes anyone?) and those people are elected by an even less informed populace, you aren't going to get a compromise that is going to help you or me. You are more likely to get one that helps AT&T and the NSA to continue to monitor everything you do online [eff.org].