NSF Tags $30M For Game-Changing Internet Research

coondoggie writes "So you want to build a better Internet? The National Science Foundation today said it would spread $30 million over 2-4 projects that radically transform the Internet 'through new security, reliability and collaborative applications. The NSF said its Future Internet Architectures (FIA) program wants: "Technological innovations and the requirements of emerging and yet to be discovered applications, the Internet of the future is likely to be different from that of today. Proposals should not focus on making the existing Internet better through incremental changes, but rather should focus on designing comprehensive architectures that can meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century."'"

Re:Likely to be different?

[FooAtWFU]

I predict the next big thing for the Internet will need to wait until Google rolls out its version of a communications security infrastructure, issuing people certificates (why not? they know enough about you already) and helping them with public-key cryptography, ultimately leading to an email system free of spam.

Some decade.

Ye gods...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm certain that the major innovations they are targeting will come in time there are some fairly basic changes to how the internet works today that can have major benefits. These are mostly in the way that identity is managed on the web and 'net.

The technologies exist today to make the web twice as easy and half as painful to use, including the end of passwords as we know them. When will these real changes that will help foster the next generation of technologies come to fruition?

Time to disolve NSF?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is much better use for 30M such as spending it on education, which is broken rather than Internet which isn't not so broken.

This is nice

[dedazo]

But honestly, with the US so far behind other industrialized nations in broadband quality and penetration, shouldn't this be promoted by Japan or South Korea? Who cares about the super duper better intertubes if you're still stuck at the 1.2mbps downstream dictated by the local suckage cable mini-monopoly?

I'm all for this type of thing, I really am. But fix the basement before you go adding a new chimney.

Hey, I'll take a couple hundred grand for this

[goose-incarnated]

I doubt that this is open to non-Americans, so I'll just post my idea here instead:

Make every endpoint (home 'puter) have no less than two different ISP connections. Then every home computer can also be a router. This does mean that every single packet has to be encrypted (a solved problem, methinks), and that every single endpoint is properly uniquely identified.

Advantages are numerous - encryption is required for it to work at all, consumers have redundancy (not only for their own net connection, but throughout the entire path as well), ISP's don't have to provide $X Mb/s connection, they can provide $X/2 Mb/s and the computer can load-balance while routing. Last advantage is that torrent-like downloads can take place without the need for special p2p software.

Disadvantages do, of course, include the fact that every consumer doubles their internet bill and that a govt is unlikely to fund a global TOR rollout :-)

that won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I think. I can't see China accepting anypart of a future internet they don't have significant control of. We could see the rise of a highly distributed internet There would still be global networks, but under different control and not interlinked. What I would like to see is internet 2.0 being a slow transition over to ipv6 address space. What I'd really like to see is people setting up their own private network - using whatever protocol they want - communities. Decentralization would be healthy I think.

Re:Likely to be different?

[misnohmer]

You may like this [http://www.nebunet.com] - social networking of any IP connected devices, not just people. The idea is to turn the internet into many independent secure networks as easy to use as your favorite social networking site. It's not something google would like to see - self organizing internet based on context - but most people would. What do you think?

Whose security are we talking about?

[CopaceticOpus]

Increased security, built into the fabric of the internet, sounds like a goal everyone can support. However, to build security into the network, you must necessarily build in stronger methods of identifying the users of the system. This will make anonymity much more difficult, and will greatly increase the government's ability to track the online activities of individuals.

There are some situations where that power would be used for good, but do we really want to allow the government more power and more ability to monitor the population? I am sure that they are drooling over the possibility. The recent abuses of the FBI should give everyone a fair idea of how responsibly this power would be used.

I'm not sure what a "game-changing" technology would look like, anyhow. The internet is fundamentally about shuffling bits of data between endpoints. That much is not going to change, and the rest is just implementation. What are we going to try, sending twos?