I hate to burst your bubble....

In the early-mid 80's most of the Internet work force either had PhDs or working toward their PhDs. The Internet was largely run by faculty, their research groups (i.e. grad students), university & contract R&D staff (e.g. BBN and staff working at universities). When the Internet got more popular and universities/others started teaching courses and programs for network management - we basically got the degrees that are required by ISPs. So, we basically went from PhDs --> undergraduate degrees.

There were rarely people with training based on tinkering in their garage running the routers/links/etc. of the Internet :-)

The above was simply a trend as a result of the maturation process of the technology. In the 80's, very few parts of the Internet worked well or were easy to fix/understand. As things started working better and changed less often, we could start teaching classes and have companies with support-systems targeting undergrads rather than PhD students.

Another important factor in all this, is that no one wants to hire you with no training/experience because you will do a terrible job. You are basically paying the university to get experience quickly. You could get that experience working in your garage and reading books - but this is slow. In addition, a hiring company has no easy way to judge whether you really read the books and tinkered on the right things. A university is also a certification authority - they verify that you did the work. This is why companies require a degree and sometimes overlook it for candidates with important experience.

This is not the same type of attack -- the AS7007 problem was a route hijack attack.

The sigcomm paper describes a more basic route convergence issue with path vector protocols

The paper describes the use of packet loss to create a BGP session failure and the impact of repeated announce/withdraw traffic to slow other routers. This is also not new. However, the appropriate point of reference is "RFC 1266 - Experience with the BGP Protocol" (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1266.html). Read section 9 -- this points to how packet loss results in BGP failures and points to how ensuring BGP packets have priority fixes this. This was published in 1991 :-) and is generally well known.

Similarly, I haven't read the referenced NDSS paper (http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/lci-ndss.pdf) but I am also surprised that BGP holddown timers don't prevent some of the related route churn problems.

1) Blaming corporations is the wrong path. Corporations are forced to compete on a global playing field. Our world has evolved to the point that having large research labs (e.g., IBM TJ Watson, AT&T Research, Bell Labs, MSR) is not an effective competitive advantage. The problem is that, in many fields of research, it is too easy to play catch-up. These research labs put out a few great ideas that are brought to market (but the labs cost a large number of $). These ideas are copied (i.e. people come up with similar techniques that circumvent patents) sufficiently well in a few months. As a result, the profit gained by being first to market is limited and the business of creating ideas is no longer profitable for individual companies :-(

Unfortunately, we still need research to advance and grow entire markets - the problem is identifying a way to fund or compensate companies/individuals/organizations for their research contributions without relying on market profits.

Basically, the world changed - rapid prototyping and easy access to ideas/research are common to most topic areas. It's time to face the facts and come up with something new that works.

2) Foreigners and graduate school. This is a huge problem. The American graduate education system has survived on the influx of students from countries like India and China. Unfortunately, the combination of improving opportunities in these countries and a negative immigration environment in the US has made this transfer of talent slow down. In 20 years, I am not convinced that the best and brightest will continue to come to the U.S.

3) No jobs for PhDs. I agree that jobs are getting harder to find for PhDs. Given comment (1) above, I am not sure there are going to be more PhD research jobs in the future. If we solve (1), there will be more jobs.

This looks a lot like Pioneer:

Seshadri, Arvind, Mark Luk, Elaine Shi, Adrian Perrig, Leendert van Doorn, and Pradeep Khosla.
"Pioneer: Verifying Integrity and Guaranteeing Execution of Code on Legacy Platforms."
In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Brighton, United Kingdom, October 2005.

http://sparrow.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/projects/pioneer.pdf