David Clark: Rebuild the Internet

boarder8925 writes "David Clark, who led the development of the internet in the 1970s, is working with the National Science Foundation on a plan for a whole new infrastructure to replace today's global network. The NSF aims to put out a request for proposals in the fall for plans and designs that could lead to what Clark called a 'clean slate' internet architecture. Those designs, Clark said, could be tested on the National LambdaRail, the nationwide optical network that researchers are using to experiment with new networking technologies and applications."

Wont happend

"A whole new infraestructure" you say?.
We cant even start using the new ipv6 protocol. I dont think we are there yet. Try in 10 or so years.

Re:Wont happend

Might be because we realized that the IPV6 protocol was unnecessary.

Once people were forced to NAT, it suddently dawned on the great mass of people that workstations shouldn't be getting public IPs for security and management reasons.

Nor for that matter should these up and coming embedded devices be placed on the public internet either. It just isn't appropriate.

Remember: The Internet was supposed to be a network of networks NOT _THE NETWORK_.

Most of the remaining IP allocation problems result from certain lingering gross misallocations such as the Class A block assigned to MIT.

NAT isn't a permanent solution

NAT doesn't seem to completely solve the addressing problem. According to this report by Cisco to Congress [doc.gov] (warning: pdf), we're going to run out of addresses for real somewhere between 2015 and 2025.

Yeah, I know they're a vendor, but this is a really reasonable report. They counter a lot of the hype, but they say we're going to need IPv6 eventually, so let's start now, before the Japanese and Koreans have built all the infrastructure and Americans are left to buy from them.

Yeah, thanks a lot NAT

Thanks for making "secure by default" less important.

Thanks for retarding IPv6 development.

Thanks for necessitating the invention of UPnP.

Thanks for screwing up peer to peer connections for legitimate things like videoconferencing and file transfers.

Thanks for continuing to allow ISPs to treat IP addresses like some sort of rare element.

Thanks for mangling things like FTP.

Re:Wont happend

NAT is the greatest evil to befall the Internet.
Want to run a webserver behind NAT? Forward the port through NAT. Want to run *two* webservers behind NAT? Say goodbye to half of your visitors behind stupid proxies that only relay requests to port 80.

NAT is bad because it is a complex layer of translation software, NOT a firewall. Its job is to try to fit packets through places where they shouldn't be going, not the other way around. A stateful firewall is a much better solution. Even Windows XP SP2 gets it right in that regard.

Unless you *like* translation gateways everywhere, the idea of a network of networks is a silly idea. MITM attacks and the general waste of resources are the two biggest problems with that concept.

Embedded devices like, say, a PDA shouldn't be on the Internet to receive phone calls or send email? What do you have against the Internet that a stateful firewall and a well written network stack wouldn't fix?

Re:Wont happend

And yes, cell phones and PDAs should *NOT* be exposed to the internet.

And yes, cell phones and PDAs *will be* exposed to the Internet. This is what conversion is about. Especially cell phones need to be reached independently of each other. Currently you do it with the phone number, and the difference to an IP address is the limitation of services that work with phone numbers as targets.

Mobile Phone (GSM) providers allow sending of SMS and MMS via SMTP to the target phones. This is (from a protocol stack point of view) an extension of the address space within a high level protocol: The phone number is just the user name in the email. There is no reason why this couldn't or shouldn't be done on the IP level itself. Malicously malformed MMS and SMS can corrupt a buggy phone operating system independently of the address space used to get them there. Look at the phreaks and their ways to hack into telephone equiment.

Any addressable system with an incorretly implemented service is attackable from remote. That is completely independent from the method of addressing. And phones have to be addressable to make sense to most people. (The limitation to 'most people' is necessary to block the uebercorrect who might be pointing out that there are people who never get a phone call anyway...)

Re:Wont happend

... certain lingering gross misallocations ...


6.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
7.0.0.0/8 Defense Information Systems Agency
8.0.0.0/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc
9.0.0.0/8 IBM Corporation
11.0.0.0/8 DoD Intel Information Systems
12.0.0.0/8 AT&T WorldNet Services
13.0.0.0/8 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
15, 16.0.0.0/8 Hewlett-Packard Company
17.0.0.0/8 Apple Computer, Inc.
18.0.0.0/8 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
19.0.0.0/8 Ford Motor Company
20.0.0.0/8 Computer Sciences Corporation
21, 22.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
25.0.0.0/8 Royal Signals and Radar Establishment
26, 28, 29, 30.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
32.0.0.0/8 AT&T Global Network Services
33.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
34.0.0.0/8 Halliburton Company
35.0.0.0/8 Merit Network Inc.
38.0.0.0/8 Performance Systems International Inc.
40.0.0.0/8 Eli Lilly and Company
41.0.0.0/8 African Network Information Center
44.0.0.0/8 Amateur Radio Digital Communications
45.0.0.0/8 Interop Show Network
47.0.0.0/8 Bell-Northern Research
48.0.0.0/8 Prudential Securities Inc.
51.0.0.0/8 Department of Social Security of UK
52.0.0.0/8 E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., Inc.
53.0.0.0/8 cap debis ccs (c/o Mercedes Benz AG
54.0.0.0/8 Merck and Co., Inc.
55.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
56.0.0.0/8 U.S. Postal Service
57.0.0.0/8 SITA-Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques
1,2,3,4,5,14, 23, 27, 31, 36, 37, 39, 42, 46, 49, 50 are reserved to IANA

It would be tempting to say: Nothing to see here people... please move along..., but amongst all the squatters is one new allocation, a single class A net allocated this year for the entire African continent. It works too, I've already had two 419s from it ;-)

Re:Wont happend

NAT is a horrible solution. When I see someone actively _advocating_ more NAT I know that either they're selling a NAT product ("Cutting your face off is a great idea, and with new faceCutOff DX we guarantee only a few weeks of agony!") or they haven't looked very hard at the problem.

The Internet is a Peer-to-Peer network. Yesterday's big application, the "web app" didn't need this feature, but tomorrows potential big applications almost all do. If you disable them by using NAT, you're back where businesses were in 1996 when they started to realise that they should be on the web but had no clue how. Oops.

Seen all those annoying worms that choose random IPv4 Internet addresses and attack them? If a hundred of those worms hit one address per second they'll hit most machines in a year. With a thousand infected machines they'll take a month, But with IPv6 they don't stand a chance. A million worms, trying 10 IPv6 addresses per second, won't find more than a tiny fraction of vulnerable machines in a year. Even inside your much smaller corporate network "guessing" IPv6 addresses isn't feasible.

Elsewhere in this thread someone has observed that ordinary customers don't switch at the point of least pain. They wait, and wait, until they can't tolerate any more pain and then switch. Then they say "Oh, that was better than I expected" and maybe write an article for their trade magazine, "Why switching was actually a pretty good idea".

The point of least pain came when more than one network hardware vendor had IPv6 native. That was several years ago. Anyone buying new kit after that point should have been negotiating for IPv6 and either getting it, or getting a discount to "do without" it for a few more years. Otherwise you're a sucker.

IPv6

We cant even start using the new ipv6 protocol. I dont think we are there yet.

I've been to IPv6 summits. I've also served as the senior technology officer for several telecom companies (one of which was a very first CIX-W router connected ISP and frustration to Paul Vixie in our rather unique connection to the early Santa Clara peer point).

Through my experience, I've advocated IPv6, yet I've found significant resistance from nearly all sectors of business (except from South Korean and South American investors - go figure). Some of the problems IPv6 plans (and this "new infrastructure" pipe dream) face include:

• zero customer demand: dot-com was great for us geeks pushing ideas before their time. Fortunately or not, its demise meant a return to financial foundations. If customers don't demand it, there's no reason to work on it today. If it's the next great thing, then get customers understanding it! (Thought: How do we do this for IPv6? I can think of a thousand technical explanations for why this is. My customers would tell me they expect me to do these things already at no additional cost to them. Absent additional capital, it ain't happening in today's telecom market). Lacking a killer ap that only works in IPv6 land, the finance people won't back any infrastructure upgrade. Here's the rule: either make money or save money. IPv6... well, it adds features without really making or saving money. Guess what the CFO will decide? New features don't quite present well in any capital budget analysis (and rightfully so).
  
  
• State of the consumer market: Let's be honest for a second. While we dream of IPv6 efficiencies, the world out there is clinging onto Windows 98, first edition. They're stuck in the IP dark ages (hell, I had a discussion today with a Fortune 500 senior manager who thought dialup optimization was the same thing as broadband. *sigh* It's the Dilbert PHB "etch and sketch" laptop all over again!). These are people that can't understand their kids P2P and the five trojans pushing out spam are why their broadband is slow. These are the people that refuse to use antivirus, personal firewalls and spyware detection. Do you expect them to understand the nuances of better IP networks? QoS? Mobile IP? Dream on...
  
  
• We've forgotten our dirty bastard heritage: Don't forget, TCP/IP was the the dark horse protocol. OSI was the committees pick, yet nasty old ad hoc IP ended up winning out. NSFNET and the Baby Bell NAP plan connected by ANS was Al Gore's dream for a monopoly-powered Internet, which also flopped. A brutish commercial ISP network launched by the early CIX won out. Rarely does the committee solution prevail. Technology is one of the few areas where natural selection tends to ignore the best intentions of the wealthy and powerful elites.
  

Don't think I'm not wild about IPv6. I geek out and run it over AX.25 amateur networks for fun (what better way to learn a protocol). Yet the days of getting capital markets worked up in a frenzy, ready to throw hundreds of millions at network replacement are gone. Unless this latest dream is based on new tax revenues from all of us (which only creates messes like the original unaccountable NSFNET regionals), it won't go anywhere.

*scoove*

And the important question is

What will the powers that be put in there to make it easy to track and control everything we do with it?

Re:And the important question is

Remember that famous quote about the Internet treating a nuclear strike as routing errors and simply routing around it?? The same applies here - if US control of the root DNS becomes a problem to the rest of the world, expect the rest of the world to set up their own root servers and then the US-controlled Internet becomes an Intranet that may or may not have visibility to the rest of the world.

The real question is...

...is this project going to actually provide revolutionary designs to ease or eliminate the problems we face today, or is this just a matter of reinventing the wheel?

I realize that it's quite tempting for computer developers to want to clean up a system after it's done, but such work only ever works if you have a clear understanding of the problems faced under the current codebase as well as an absolute need to fix the issues with the current system. Simply saying, "it'll be better/cooler/faster" just doesn't cut it. Those things can be obtained from evolutionary development. Revolutionary means that you are uprooting all the existing users. The payoff MUST be tremendous or they ignore it!

rebuild the internet ..

No problem.

1. get fresh pr0n

2. ???

3. profit!

Summary

Clark said he would like to see two things addressed in any replacement for the current internet. The first is a coherent security architecture. The second is a healthy economic infrastructure for network service providers, who will need a bigger piece of the pie in the new internet than the one they are getting now if they are going to help pay for building it.

I read this as users having no anonymity and paying through the nose for it.

Can I just keep the old internet?

Wasn't IPv6 supposed to replace the current?

The internet might have its problems, but it's here now and everybody is on it. Unless they add a backward compatibility layer (doubtful if they are designing a 'clean slate' architecture), it becomes a chicken and the egg phenomenon, no matter how much better the technology might be. Nobody will want to use this architecture until enough people adopt it, and enough people will need to adopt it before joe average uses it. All the while the existing internet is there.

Let's rebuild it with

PHP and MySQL [slashdot.org] which can do anything!

Re:Let's rebuild it with

*shudder* Don't even joke about that!

Wouldn't it just start all over

It seems every measure to stop phishing, spam and the like, just results in a means to circumvent. I'm not against renewing efforts to re-engineer, but I'm not sure it's fruitful to go after it for those reasons. IPv6 is a moderate step in that direction and is worth giving a chance.

Sooo.. internet2?

How long before the RIAA tries to get on this rebuilt internet, eh? ;)

These projects never work!

The clean slate never stays clean for long. Sooner or later you get weak NAPs, preferential treatment at peers, crappy colos, blah blah blah, these issues will just emerge in the "new" network once it goes live (and then someone else will want to start "clean" all over again!). Meanwhile the "old" internet will continue to use market forces to make the changes people really demand, even if it results in "uncleanliness". In any case Internet2 was supposed to provide this by now...it was always intended to be for "everyone", jsut students and profs first. What happened?

Reminds me of old habits

"Fuck it! I'll rewrite it from scratch."

That approach is always more fun

Not gonna happen

"A super-high-speed internet could even allow people a world apart to collaborate inside elaborate 3-D virtual arenas, a process called tele-immersion."

I believe the technical term for this is MMORPG. It appears to work pretty well with our current internet.

All joking aside, I don't think anything will change any time in the near future. IPv6 is probably the most radical change the internet will see for possibly decades to come, and that can't even catch on. People are simply not going to pay to have the internet re-architected when it is working well enough as it is; why reinvent the wheel while its still rolling. Things along these lines have been proposed before, and I'm sure will be proposed again, and I'm sure that one day, the internet will eventually be rewired. However, this is still far ahead of its time.

Cars still ride on wheels, power still goes out with storms, and cell phones still lose service underground. What makes anyone think the internet is going to be any different.

Not a bad idea...

I'll agree with him that Internet2 hasn't lived-up to what it should have been, and trying something completely different would be a very good idea.

However, I don't agree that the current internet is in-need of replacement. Creating TCP/IP packets requires significant processing power, and a simpler protocol would mean more devices being online, but by the time anything new becomes accepted, a $1 chip will be able to do it all.

If you want to improve the internet, put explicit congestion notification back into all TCP stacks, as it was before the BSD stack left it out... Goodbye massive packet loss due to minor congestion. Require all vendors to support jumbo frames... And many more small changes (to the existing internet).

Like Admiral Ackbar says...

"It's a trap!"

Hashes of public keys as ip addresses?

I don't remember who's idea it was, but if we have all future internet devices use encryption (like IPSec and IPv6), then if we have a portion of the ip address be a crypto hash of the devices public key, then it would make spoofing harder. Of course part of the ip address would still have to be reserved for routing purposes for efficiency.

human error

"Look at phishing and spam, and zombies, and all this crap," said Clark. "Show me how six incremental changes are going to make them go away."

Wait Mister Clark, you show me how *any* amount of change(s) will ever fix the inevitable human error, whether it be running a bad program or an actual programing error-- I'm sorry, but no design change will ever 100% fix that.

The age old wisdom..

Don't fix what ain't broken.

Sure, there's almost always better ways to do things that are only illuminated by hindsight, but that doesn't mean that the old way should just be tossed out and replaced.

Besides, the Internet is one of those amazing flukes of history. It's a very open, public, and free world unlike anything before it. Does anyone really think that something designed now in the age of terrorism, by committee, using government money (NSF) would be carefully designed to protect those initial design elements that make the Internet what it is today?

Re:The age old wisdom..

At the moment these guys aren't trying to fix anything. What they are trying to do is see if something alternative could work better. See this like a prototype of a car: in order to be able to test new technologies properly you need to build it as if there were no restrictions. While this new technology might not replace anything, aspects of it might be incorporated if it proves there is a better way of getting things done.

I was going to carp and complain ...

... but while composing that post, it occurred to me that this is actually a very good idea and should be explored.

The premise of the existing Internet was benign cooperation. The previous /. story on the 12 minute Windows heist clearly demonstrates that that model is no longer valid.

I think it is a good time to take a look at all of the layers and see if something better is possible. I am not suggesting that Clark et. al. be given Carte Blanche to build a new Internet. The naysayers may well be right that any significant change would be practically impossible. But I do think it is a very good idea to investigate what changes are possible and what benefits those changes could provide. I'd hope that practical concerns of getting from here to there would also be explored.

Thank God.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The U.S. government will indefinitely retain oversight of the main computers that control traffic on the Internet, ignoring calls by some countries to turn the function over to an international body, a senior official said Thursday.

I don't know what this new Internet will look like

But I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.

If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this new Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.

Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as difficult as factoring a 2048-bit public key.

Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the physical location of the offending server. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Homeland Security Department. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives recipes or the formulas for nerve gases.) The supercomputers that constantly monitor the cameras mounted on every lampost in the United States of (God Bless It!) America will be ordered to recognize the criminals' faces, and when they are spotted trying to flee to the Amazon jungle, orbiting lasers will vaporize their bodies, leaving nary but a whisp of smoke.

When a close family friend tries to comfort one of the grieving mothers for the loss of her son, she will desperately proclaim "No, I have no children! You must have mistaken me for someone else. Please leave me alone!" before she scurries rapidly away.

National firewalls such as those employed by The People's Republic of China are expensive and difficult to maintain. They are notoriously leaky, and easy to circumvent by anyone determined enough to find out how. But worse, they impede the economic potential of emerging economies such as China, which necessarily bottleneck technical data and eCommerce in order to have a single chokepoint for the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and Pornography).

Imagine, if you will, the potential of our New Internet: not only by technical design, but by international treaty (enforced by the threat of military intervention on the part of the UN Security Council), each nation will have a national firewall which is as transparent to the air to fully-licensed Windows Media Video files of Barney the Dinosaur and paid-up Wal-Mart orders, yet absolutely impenetrable to content not sanctioned by Homeland Security, the Republican Party, the 700 Club and the Boy Scouts.

I, for one, am weary of our present Internet, cesspool that it is of moral depravity and copyright infringement. I long for the days of yore, when men were men, women wore hoopskirts, and racial minorities were separate but equal. And so, I raise my right hand and shout with an enthusiastic "Heil!":

I welcome my new Internet overlords!

Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit

Who? Me?

Holy crap, I go offline for 12 hours and you guys are giving me this kind of jobs?? I quit! Nothing like signing on to /. and seeing your name in the top headline. -- David Clark

Uhh... Mister...?

When you're done with the old Internet, can we have it?

Hugs,

The Developing World.

I don't know guys...

Sounds pricey. I don't think I can afford more than $6 million to rebuild him... I mean it...

Ok. some proposals for you.

Either use IPv6 or one of the predecessor protocols. (One early suggestion for "IP-ng" was a protocol with adjustable-length addressing. Thus, the backbone would have very short addresses, and machines close to the edge would have longer ones. This was originally rejected as routers simply weren't advanced enough to cope with a routing system like that -and- handle IPv4, but this is a couple of decades later, and a "clean-slate" would mean you don't need to worry so much about compatibility issues.)

Second, absolutely mandate IPSec. Don't just "mandate" it and then ignore it, as happened with IPv6, but make it a pre-requisite for all users. That gives e-commerce a lot more assurance on secure transactions and authentication, which seems to meet one of their requirements.

Third, mnandate QoS. QoS not only guarantees network quality, which would interest a LOT of corporate users, but also provides a mechanism for increasing profit. Simply offer different levels of guaranteed quality at different prices. This meets another requirement.

Fourth, the biggest new market is in mobile devices and wireless networking. So support them! What is the point of the IETF churning out megabytes of specs on mobile IP and mobile networks, or of software developers supporting all these new protocols, if none of the ISPs or network engineers give a damn? It would also provide an additional service, therefore an additional revenue stream, therefore also meeting the profit requirement.

(Mobile networks are where all the wireless users are going to stay using the same router, but the router itself is moving through the network. If you were to have WAPs on aircraft or trains, where you are static relative to the vehicle, but the vehicle is moving between ground stations, this is probably the way you'd want to implement it.)

Fifth, it is possible to balance anonymity with accountability. Accountability merely requires that machines are who they claim they are and (where user identification is relevent) users are who they claim they are. It does NOT require that anyone actually posesses enough information to actually identify those machines or users, only that when a claim is made, it is verifiable in some way.

We already have Kerberos for authentication, so it would seem a fairly trivial extension to use that as your authentication mechanism. The token does not reveal your identity, but it can be verified with a Kerberos server in the heirarchy used for authentication by that user, to prove that the user did identify themselves correctly.

If that isn't good enough, use X.509 certificates at both host and user levels. Lots more money to be made there. It doesn't kill anonymity, as you can perfectly well have a certificate that doesn't say anything useful or self-incriminating. It would still be useful for accountability, though, as no two entities, no two machines and no two users should have identical certificates. At the very least, the key used to examine the certificate would be different, even if the content itself was identical.

This would be more than good enough to ensure that Joe Bank Manager's personal checking account could not be logged into by Sammy Script-Kiddy - there's your accountability - but would not require people in politically dangerous countries (such as the US) to reveal anything that would compromise their safety, meeting a lot of the anonymity requirement.

As for the "upgrades" cost - that's just because most providers (backbone or ISP) are too cheap to do it right the first time. Optic Fibre has been around a LONG time, and to upgrade an optic link just requires upgrading the transceivers at each end - so long as the fibre is of good enough quality. At present speeds, a single fibre can carry about 4-5 terabits per second, and typical bundles have about 20 or so fibres, giving you 100 terabits per second.

Lets say that, when the US Government was still runnin

Why?

What is more interesting is not whatever lame-ass design this old fart has for a "new" Internet but the reasons why he thinks the Internet as it is today sucks.

NSF?

Quick, someone call JC Denton!

Blu-Ray too large for you? Have no fear!

NSF R&D

Researcher #1: Hmm, this old version of the internet is too shabby. Lets make a new one!

Researcher #2: This time, lets use those new "optical wires". I bet the speed will be fast!

Researcher #1: Whatever it takes to screw over the media industry.

Researcher #1: Amen.

baby steps don't always cut it.

"Anything you can do all at once, you could do with incremental changes," said Robert Kahn

/me slaps Robert Kahn upside the head with his quantum mechanics textbook

Don't let legacy linger forever

Define, as part of the standards, that when certain standards have been upgraded in important ways, within five years all essential infrastructure software must be upgraded so that it understands the new version.

This should apply to essential infrastructure like routers, DNS servers, SMTP servers, and so on. If a server does not understand a protocol that has been around for five years, that's reason enough to refuse connection.

If this becomes part of the standards, we won't have to support ancient legacy forever. When countries with languages other than English want readable domain names, we won't have to live forever with kludges like punycode, such kludges will stay just for five years, after that real solutions can be used instead. If/when solutions to serious problems like spam and DDoS are found and standardised, we can count on the infrastructure to support the solutions within five years. Stuff like IPv6 could spread quickly and smoothly.

Of course, having to upgrade introduces some inconvenience and expenses. But having to support ancient legacy is also inconvenient and expensive. In spite of the upgrade inconvenience, in the long run this kind of limit should save lots of money for everyone.

Clean Slate is good for research

When I was a grad student, creating new operating systems (from scratch) was all the rage. We were trying to replace UNIX (in it's various forms: BSD, SunOS, AT&T SYSV, Linux hadn't caught on yet). It just seemed ready to be replaced.

I think a lot was learned from creating those OS's. But, what ended up happening is that the *NIX's easily incorporated the interesting features in those research operating systems and so it was difficult to get hardly anybody to give up UNIX for a totally new OS.

A "clean slate" internet would probably follow the same path. It's worth doing but don't be surprised if nobody adopts your new internet but instead incorporates the most successful features into the existing Internet.

Now, with billing!

Clark said he would like to see two things addressed in any replacement for the current internet. The first is a coherent security architecture. The second is a healthy economic infrastructure for network service providers, who will need a bigger piece of the pie in the new internet than the one they are getting now if they are going to help pay for building it.

This guy must be getting support from a telco.

Telecommunications providers hate the Internet. Not only is the Internet too cheap, it's not set up for detailed billing. The US Internet backbone cost about $1bn to build, and costs about $100 million per year to run. For something that handles over 100 million users, that's nothing. All the intelligence is in the end nodes, so telcos don't get to add "value added services" for which they can overcharge.

What telcos want is an environment they control, like cell phones. With charges for everything from ring tones to SMS messages. That's what Clark is talking about here.

The telcos tried this idea back in the 1980s, and it was called TP4, or "ISO 8073 COTP Connection-Oriented Transport Protocol - X.224" [univ-angers.fr] X.224 is very much like TCP, but without the adaptive retransmit machinery to work well over unreliable links. You're supposed to run X.224 over a reasonably reliable virtual circuit provided by a telco. For which you pay by the packet, like X.25 or ISDN. Bad idea. Windows NT4 actually had support for X.224, and some older Cisco routers understand it, but it's dead.

This is not a place we, as users, want to go.

What to consider

I only hope they didn't forget to hire Al Gore or else this won't work.

Instead of a new internet architecture ...

... how about a new Windows architecture (something that maintains the same 0wn35h1p).

... how about a new brain architecture for the masses (something that won't give out banking and PayPal passwords to every phishing email).

We have many, many fundamental problems in our society. Most of the problems of the internet are not really caused by the internet itself, but are instead reflections of ourselves, our society, and the morons that surround us.

But I wouldn't mind having an internet the way it was back around 1990, before the web thing started. Yeah, we did have morons online even then, but everone knew who both of them were.

But, that's not how it works, folks!

Guys, guys GUYS!

I see many posts here about how we need to "mandate" this and "require" that and blah blah blah...

But the Internet, by design, is lasse faire! There is no "mandating" ANYTHING! Anybody can hook up to their neighbor, who hooks up to some guy across town, who is hooked up to a couple other folks...

The Internet is DECENTRALIZED and OPEN. The closest it gets to mandating anything is the much-disputed RBLs. I, for example, block all email from most Asian countries - nothing personal, but it sure drops the SPAM load with virtually no complaints. But, I can't mandate what the Chinese or Koreans do with their network - I can only mandate what they do with respect to MY networks.

The Internet is merely a commonly agreed upon set of standards for communications across disparate networks, and it's performing the task of connecting networks the world over with grace and flair.

Don't tell me that just because Windows systems get infected in 12 minutes, that the Internet is broken. Sorry. The Internet is working fantastically. It's Windows that's broken. It's not up to the task of functioning on a globally accessable network.

So far, every significant "problem" I've heard with the Internet hasn't been with the Internet, but with the systems at its fringes. SPAM. zombies. Worms. Viruses. Exploits. All are simply side effects of a "zero friction network" as espoused by the all-knowing Bill Gates in his 90's book, "The Road Ahead", combined with systems not able to cope with the ramifications.

Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, Linus Torvalds, and all the others are learning now what that truly means, and over the next decade or so, we'll see major advances in developing the kind of security needed to handle this frictionless network.

In short: the Internet is doing just fine, people! It's the systems hooked up to it that have problems!

I know what I'd like embedded....

This would be a fun one that probably no techie, and no engineer could do. It would be very, very nice, if the ubiquitous they, should they begin building this thing, were to get a nice, nasty team of copyright and patent lawyers together and tame them. Next, have them attempt to build into this thing, either through patents or liscensing agreements or whatever, some protection against the flood/slurry/deluge of crappy and bogus patents we've all seen over the past three years. No more "patent on pointing and clicking on an hyperlink," no more "patent on using the internet for a monetary transaction," crap.

I'm no more a lawyer than I am a techie, so I have no idea of how this could even begin to be started, but to put it simply, anyone designing this thing has simply got to take all the legal wrangling and abuse of the past few years into account, and at least attempt to deal with it, otherwise I don't care how wonderful this new internet is, none of us will be able to use it without ten subscriptions and an RFID tag shoved up our butts.

Let's hope for the best

IMHO tcp/ip is a really bad standard.
Already back when it was invented it was not that glamourous. If we use it nowadays it is not because it is the best network infrastructure but because it was back then the easiest and cheapest network solutions.
After all the (theorical) OSI standards did exist, and everybody hoped that ATM would replace tcp/ip ...

When you see the QOS needed for VOIP, Video-conference and live TV feed ... You realize that tcp/ip belong to the past.

The next item of news

The RIAA and MPAA get representatives in the Internet 3.0 rebuilding committee, eliminate the pesky peer-to-peer architecture in favour of regulated servers and restricted clients, and build pervasive DRM into it at the protocol level.

Gentlemen, we can rebuilt it ...

.. better, stronger, faster.

Missing the whole picture

One of the key points in the article (that has been missed so far) is that the research for this is being done on the National Lambda Rail. One key technology that hasn't been mentioned yet is DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing). This runs 30-40 different wavelengths over a single fiber. Each wavelength (lambda) can currently carry 10 Gb/s of data, 40 Gb/s in some cases, and 100 Gb/s is on its way. That means that a single fiber can carry up to 4 Tb/sec of data in the real near future (right now in some labs). The next important technology is ROADMs (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers). These devices allow individual lambdas to be inserted, extracted, or tapped from a fiber. Next is GMPLS (Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching). This a switching framework that ties together the ROADMs and optical switches to allow a single lambda to be routed through an optical mesh network. Actually it sets up a per use circuit through the mesh for any particular lambda. Also, anything that can be converted to an optical wavelength can be routed over this kind of network, not just ethernet. Fibre Channel, SONET, high defition video and ethernet can all be routed over this kind of network at the same time.

Truly success has fathers... many

"David Clark, who led the development of the internet in the 1970s"

Vint Cerf, Al Gore, David Clark...?

It's not the NETWORK , it's the APPLICATIONS.

"Look at phishing and spam, and zombies, and all this crap," said Clark. "Show me how six incremental changes are going to make them go away."

I can do it in two incremental changes.

Ban any application that explicitly provides a mechanism for automatically executing native code or unrestricted scripts received from an untrusted source. With or without a "Do you really want to do something stupid" dialog.

No ActiveX, no "open safe files after download", no "click here to install XPI", nothing.

Ban any operating system that, after a normal install, has any network servers listening for routed protocols without explicit action by an actual human being.

No sendmail/apache/NFS, no Lan Manager/Windows Networking, nothing.

Without these changes, no changes at the network level will do anything to solve the problem he's trying to solve. With them, you limit attackers to social engineering... and it is possible to learn not to be socially engineerable.

Internet 2 eh?

Just do not let Microsoft help develop it. Can you imagine accessing the Microsoft Winternet2 that is totally propietary and incompatable with the current internet. AND It crashes and has to be restarted every half an hour. And when you are unavailable it just delivers to a random person near you so it can be helpful and you never loose another email.

And will it have a "Copyright Flag"?

Let me guess, it will contain the data equivalent of a "Broadcast Flag" right? (ie: copyright flag)

Owned by Clark

Clark to himself: "Hmmm I invented this internet but I forget to patent it... why don't I make a new internet (Internet II), and everyone will have to pay me for it."

Okay, who posted the article from 1990?

A super-high-speed internet could even allow people a world apart to collaborate inside elaborate 3-D virtual arenas, a process called tele-immersion.

Yeah, it also goes by the names Battlefield 1942, Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, Far Cry, and several others -- everyone should try it, it rocks!

A NEW Internet?!

I'm not done looking at the one I've got now!

640K is more than enough

why would we ever need a new internet? it's not like there's 100 million Chinese online today and the Net was built before Kanji and other ideograms became popular ...

seriously, let's go to IPv6 with Mars/Saturn/Jupiter extensions, ditch all the cruft, and do it right.

Grokster ruling and MPAA

You saw the ruling - this just encourages more efficient and faster piracy. It is illegal, immoral and aids terrorists.

Just wait until the MPAA and RIAA hear about it.

possible, desirable, try Plan 9 networking

Any new infrastructure is feasible, if it routes IP as a legacy service, and interacts nicely with a necessary subset of old protocols, like BGP, and provides rudimentary client side tools and proxies to acess the IP world outside.

I see the problem with IP is that it is both too high level and too low level. It is too high because it requires global addressing state inside the network and does not expose nodes inside to the end nodes. It is too low, because it operates on packet level, not on a level of an abstract byte stream (or a "connection", if you want), which could be negotiated for security and speed control.

Plan 9 9P/2000P provides a better altervative. As a inheritant of file level UUCP ideas with local addressing and source routing, it provides exact control of all nodes in communication with no centralized addressing. Each hop is always authenticated with application developer friendly protocols. It is perfectly capable of carrying itself over IP links, or carrying IP over 9P.

Ah love...

could you and I, not with fate, conspire
to break this sorry scheme of things entire
could we not shatter it to bits and then
remold it nearer to our heart's desire!

- The Internet Swansong

More seriously, this is just a PR news item for a piddly little grant of $200K. MIT researchers routinely engage in this kind of vaporware research including much-hyped off-their-bottoms position papers in tight community-knit workshops.
NSF routinely awards much larger grants greater than $500K and very often even more than $1 million on collaborative grants. None of them make news, but this one does because Dave Clark is soooooo good at PR. Of course, as the article says, the program managers refused to talk to this reporter because they knew what it was worth -- nothing!!
For more info, search for recent awards on http://www.nsf.gov/ [nsf.gov]

Obligatory.

Obligatory [mintruth.com]

Re:oblig

sorry...reference was perhaps a bit too obscure [cjas.org]...(surrounding articles contain spoilers...don't wander too far if you wanna watch the series).

Please

How in the world is this Offtopic?
pr0n and Sci-Fi are the backbone of the Internet. Name an advance in Internet technology that didn't come from the pr0n community first. I mean, what else do you use 'tabbed browsing' for? Business?