Web Creators Call Internet Outdated

ElvaWSJ writes "Several networking pioneers are dissatisfied with the Internet's underpinnings, and some are offering remedies to ease the strain that bandwidth-hungry services put on technology networks. Along with other projects here in the US and around the world, numerous companies and organizations are looking to rewrite the underpinnings of the internet. This piece looks at new concerns from old hands at networking, with comments from folks like Larry Roberts and Len Bosack. 'Mr. Roberts's concern over the Internet's infrastructure stretches back years. Even while at ARPAnet, he says he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination. His fears crystallized in the late 1990s when he saw companies begin to use the Internet to make phone calls and consumers begin to dabble in online video.'"

odd...

They talk about web creators and didn't mention Mr. Manbearpig... I mean, Al Gore!

Wow.. just wow

Can we please go at least a week without hearing about the internets short comings? The internets my only friend and you are all SO mean to it. He/SHE is doing his/HER best!!! Besides, If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Leave it alone!

How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of the internet after all it has been through? It's running out of bandwidth. Packets aren't guaranteed to be delivered. People are using it for fucking video and telephone. Mr. Roberts turned out to be an engineer, and now he's selling flow routers. All you people care about is carving out bandwidth. It's a series of tubes! What you don't realize is that the Internet is just being the Internet and all you do is write a bunch of crap about it. The Internet hasn't updated its hardware in years. It prefixes everything with "www" because all you people care about is WINNING! WINNING! WINNING! LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even loads you bastards! LEAVE THE INTERNET ALONE! Please! Len Bosack talked about adequacy and said if the Internet was adequate it would connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times its capacity. Speaking of adequacy, when is it adequate to publicly bash an international communications network who is going through a hard time?

Re:Leave it alone!

Yeah, but did you catch the internet's appearance on the MTV music awards? Yikes! I don't think the internet rehearsed much, but I disagree that the internet was too fat. Oh, and did you see that the internet recently lost custody of its subnets? Sad.

Response

Web Creators Call Internet Outdated

The internet appeared very upset upon hearing this news and responded as it often does to most criticisms:

STFU n00b

Netcraft confirms

The Internet is dead.

Seriously, there really isn't anything that wrong with the Internet. Sure, it may not work perfectly, but how can you ever expect to connect so many diverse systems together in one unregulated mass and have it work perfectly? If you want a better system, go use Internet2 and leave the rest of us alone.

Re:Netcraft confirms

Seriously, there really isn't anything that wrong with the Internet.

My junk mail folder seems to disagree with you.

Re:Netcraft confirms

You're supposed to occasionally delete messages from your junk mail folder, for the exact reason of preventing it from becoming sentient. Nice work destroying us all.

Re:Netcraft confirms

Mr. Shine. Him diamond!

Re:Netcraft confirms

Blaming the internet for spam is like blaming pig farmers for low quality hot dogs. There's a connection, but you're missing other, unconnected factors that contribute more to the problem.

Any system that allows unsolicited contact is going to be open to abuse by marketing departments as all the other communication channels have shown. While DNS and other things aren't as secure as they could be, the structure of email on top of the internet is what allows for most of the abuse. Change the protocols and regulations for email and you'll get less (or at least more accurate) spam without changing the structure of the internet at all.

Re:Netcraft confirms

And I always thought IP meant INTERNET protocol...

(meaning: to change IP is to change the Internet. Changing protocols running on top of it isn't)

Re:Netcraft confirms

Well in that case, the new internet is here, it's IPv6. We are waiting for it to be adopted. So even if you came up with a new perfecter internet, there would still be a time period where it will have to be adopted. This sucker is too big to reload every router and reboot them with the new code at 0 GMT on Friday ya know.

Re:Netcraft confirms

However, SMTP is a protocol, just like TCP and IP are. Changing a protocol's specs _IS_ changing the internet. (At least IMO).

Without getting too network-geeky, while they are both protocols they operate on different levels of the OSI model [wikipedia.org].

SMTP operates at the highest level (Layer 7); it has absolutely no concern for how messages are delivered, it is only concerned with how to format those messages, how to parse and read them, etc. Once it has the message formatted as what you would recognize as email, it passes it down to lower OSI levels and stops caring. You can completely gut TCP/IP and SMTP will continue to function; likewise you can completely alter SMTP without TCP/IP even caring.

TCP, on the other hand, is a Layer 4 protocol. Layer 4 is where the actual work of sending data takes place once the connection is established, and ensures reliable transmission.

IP is a level lower, on the Network level (3). Basically speaking, it figures out how to send the data. It does the job of routing.

While it is a matter of semantics, the lower you go down the more of "the Internet" one could argue it is. I would consider it fair to say TCP and IP both make up "the Internet" (though they do not have to--this was by choice). Things like SMTP, FTP, HTTP, etc. are services that run on top.

(These explanations are greatly simplified of course.)

Re:Netcraft confirms

Blaming the internet for spam is like blaming pig farmers for low quality hot dogs.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. Please give a car analogy as per standard procedure.

Re:Netcraft confirms

Blaming the internet for spam is like blaming pig farmers for low quality hot dogs.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. Please give a car analogy as per standard procedure.

Blaming the Internet for spam is like blaming roads for drunk drivers.

Re:Netcraft confirms

"Seriously, there really isn't anything that wrong with the Internet. Sure, it may not work perfectly, but how can you ever expect to connect so many diverse systems together in one unregulated mass and have it work perfectly?"

Well, chalk it up to a bit of 'tin foil hat-ism' on my part, but, I can definitely see MANY governments wanting a hand in a redesign of the 'internet'.

Accurate identification of all using it (no more anon. access/abilities). Heavy filtering of content (gotta protect the IP of our corporate 'sponsors').....and that silly way the current internet lets most anyone connect their own computer, and be a PEER amongst all the other computers...nothing really special needed to hook up any type server you want to run, and have it be just as accesible as a room of servers from MegaCorp, Inc.

Sure the current system isn't perfect, but, in many cases those imperfections many seek to fix aren't physical...they are the ones that are more theoretical. This current internet lets Joe Q. Citizen do a little too much, speak a little to loudly....while I mourn at the loss of the "wild west" days of the internet already to a great degree, I'd hate to see it disappear entirely.

I personally am a little afraid of what some would like to fix about the current tubes we're running on.

Jetsons

Are you surprised? I mean, where's our flying cars? Aren't we supposed to have those? And push-button jobs. And robotic maids.

and consumers begin to dabble in online video..

and consumers begin to dabble in online video...

he was meant to say pRon?

Seems like someone misses being important.

"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television," he says. "I know because I designed it."

Yes, he designed it when baud rates were under 16k. The average person now has megabits of connection ready to use. Hell my cell phone has megabits ready to use. I'm sorry, but this entire article is written for 70 year old men who are slowly being phased out because there products are completly ineffective in todays world. One of them has a router that reads the type of data(email, video, etc) and then sets aside bandwith for it. ...Worst idea ever. What if my email CONTAINS video?! What then internet man?

Re:Faster protocols

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a trebuchet loaded with a metric ton of backup tapes.

Re:Faster protocols

However, Do worry about the packet loss when that metric ton of tapes land.

Web != Internet

The Web is an application on the internet but it is not the internet. There are many things that use the internet that aren't the web.

Vice of Google thinks differently ...

Quote [wired.com]: "However, unlike many, Cerf doesn't think the bandwidth issues, frequently stated as a potential stumbling block for video over the web, will be a problem. Cerf thinks that a combination of faster connections, improved network technology and not "streaming" content will alleviate any issues."

Seems like he is not engaged in a (recent) startup.

CC.

IN short

programming is hard, please change they way everything works ti suit us.KTHXBY

idiots.

Another stupid "advertisement article"

From TFA

To tackle the problem, a slew of start-ups are producing gear and software to accelerate Internet traffic or to increase the network's capacity. These include companies run by Messrs. Roberts and Bosack, as well as Riverbed Technology Inc. and Big Band Networks Inc. Other companies, such as BitGravity Inc. and Limelight Networks Inc., are creating "parallel networks" -- essentially scaled-down versions of the Internet -- to escape the glut of traffic on current networks.

Of course, the gentlemen crying wolf are the same people who run companies who can sell you stuff to fix the problem. There's no new problem here. The tubes, according to business people, always seem to be in a sorry state, about ready to crumble the moment the wrong person clicks one more time on that link promising Brittney Spears porn. And yet, I have been able to get my email every morning since 1993 when I got my first email account.

Typical fearmongering article designed to drum up new business. Mod me up, give me my karma now, and move along, nothing to see here.

Re:Another stupid "advertisement article"

Mod me up, give me my karma now, and move along, nothing to see here.

Well, it worked for you...can you blame them for trying the same? ;)

Poor planning

This has been one of the biggest problems with most companies as well... Poor planning and design. There is no way SmallCompany.com or MomAndPop.org could have known that by going world wide they'd gain a slew of business that would overwhelm their poor little SoHo office. Now they have to upgrade and add 20 servers, 2 routers and a firewall. Get real for a minute. Most companies, government organizations, etc., can't control growth and expansion, it grows, implodes at will. National Lambda Rail [nlr.net] however thrilling it may sound is a bandaid solution. I can see it now... "K Engineers, this weekend we'll be migrating ARIN and APNIC over to ipv?.lambdarail.net for better speeds"

Time to Light up some Dark Fibre?

It's my understanding that we have thousands of miles of "dark fibre [wikipedia.org]", or unused fibre optic cables running under our grounds. As capacity needs expand, are we looking to use any of this unused resource? Dotcom bubble enterprises paid a lot of money to install it, and then they went bankrupt and the fibre remains unused.

There is only one reason anyone would want

to change the internet: Control.
To establish borders and break the very thing that gives the internet so much potential and effect.
A world where no one could blog about monks being killed. A world where people fighting tyranny can't be heard from. and yes, a world where you can't watch porn.

The solution according to Roberts

The solution according to Roberts:

"Last month, his start-up, Anagran Inc., introduced a piece of gear called the flow router that he says can help modernize the Internet. The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission."

No thanks.

The solution according to Bosack:

"Last month, his company, XKL LLC, unveiled a system that allows businesses to connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times the capacity of current telecommunications pipes."

That would be really nice, how about making use of all the dark fiber first.

All in all, we see the people who were involved in the creation of the Internet now got into the private business and use all possible means of pushing said business forward. It's almost sad they did so good job the first time, that now they have created solutions in search of a problem ...

The Internet is like Walmart

Too many people know the workings of the current Internet. This is like Walmart and product placement on shelves.
Once too many people know where the stuff they really want is, they can go directly there and get it without browsing all the isles looking for it and ending up with extra stuff as well. Too many people know about the Internet as it currently exists, time to redo the shelves on the Internet and force people to start wandering thru it again, looking for what was where it should be yesterday.

Article Translation/Summary:

IPv4 is creaky, migrate to IPv6 for good justice.

Every few years

Every few years people cry out that the net is going to break down because it's to slow.
Come on! Get over it! There are lots of simple ways to build fast networks. A single fiber can easily transport 10 Gigabits per second. And a typical cable has more than 100 of those fibers. So even with todays technologies 500 Gigabits per second on a cable is perfectly doable.

The main problems currently are this:
It's hard to build a high traffic server as all the traffic will concentrate.
ISPs don't want to invest in new lines.

If you'd really change something about the network, do the following:
In IPv6 make an optional header which tells the router to try to cache it transparently, if it can. If it can, it will send the packet to a transparent proxy which will also send that header in it's queries.

So after a while you would automatically build a network of cascaded proxy servers. The network would automatically be in it's optimal configuration. If you choose not to use the proxies, just don't use that header. It's good enought if a few routers along the way support this new header, the others just need to pass it throught.

Reliability

Even while at ARPAnet, he says he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination.

So long as you're running packets over copper, or fiber, or radio waves, or any other physical medium, you're going to have the possibility of packet loss. Oops, I unplugged the cable.

I always thought that was the brilliance of IP: once you admit that packets will always be unreliable, you can build a platform on top of that which does what you want. Pretending it can be 100% reliable is a fantasy, and it doesn't help us build better networks.

The web is the same way: no database geek would have ever thought of throwing referential integrity out the window. But Tim realized that there would always be the possibility of not being able to connect, so we have the 404 page, and the web is flourishing.

If Larry has an idea for a way to guarantee packets arrive, that's great, but somehow I doubt it's physically possible. And as long as we don't have it, the best way we know how to build networks is to allow for the possibility of failure, and deal with it.

Even web clients are smart enough to say "Sorry, can't seem to connect to some-server.com right now", but if cable TV goes out all I get is a blank screen. And if my network starts to get flaky, I can pause an online video and come back later when it's fully downloaded; I can't do that on TV. Is online video really that bad? On everything except bandwidth, we're doing pretty darned good, and bandwidth is being solved as we speak.

P2P Intelligence?

I am not familiar with the internal workings of P2P software, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of the algorithms only take into account bandwidth type (modem, DSL, LAN, etc) and which peers are 'super peers' or regular peers. The one piece of information that would be important is network hierarchy, so that you give priority to local peers first. An example order would be: local LAN -> local ISP -> anyone else. The idea is that by optimising for close peers you reduce the amount of traffic going beyond the network. This is also a sort of compromise that could appease certain stingy bandwidth ISPs, since they pay less to the providers they depend on, since the amount of data leaving and entering their network is reduced.

I am not sure how you could work out which peers are considered local. Maybe hop count could do the job, but I don't know how effective that is.

Dont forget the golden rule !

"If it aint broke, DONT fix it !"

There would be NO problems if the ISPs didnt oversell and invest the phenomenonal cash they made on overselling instead of gulping it.

Its not internet's, users', or techies fault - its the big buck's fault. Ages old greed

No thanks

The article is basically just talking about bandwidth and how it may not be sufficient for video and television. The only solution other than stuff that essentially boils down to "increase bandwidth" is this one:

The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission.

So the solution is to start having ISPs analyze my network traffic ? How about NO ? No thanks. I'd rather they just implement multicast, and don't use lack of bandwidth as an excuse to start spying on the users. Heck, traffic analysis obviously won't work with encrypted content, so shall we have to choose between privacy and quality of service? I for one do NOT welcome our existing overlords snooping more on what we do, and I would prefer it if they stick to net-neutrality and actually implement protocols like multicast, that have been designed to deal with the bandwidth issues.

Something's off...

"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television," [Mr. Roberts] says. "I know because I designed it."

... later ...

[Mr. Roberts] raised $317 million from venture capitalists for Caspian to manufacture the flow-based routers that could analyze Internet traffic and improve how that traffic moved.

Now, maybe I'm dense here, but when he says that he designed the Internet, I imagine that he's talking about a lower level than the design of routers. In fact, earlier, he says that one of the problems is that it doesn't guarantee that packets arrive at their destination, leading me to believe that he's talking about, at highest, the IP level. So my question is, how is this router project related? What does it have to do with the Internet problems we're supposedly facing? Is this router going to change the basic design of the Internet? I don't know, I can't say exactly what's wrong and I can't say if it's the article author or Roberts or the editor, but it's just so off I smell bullshit somewhere.

Another thing that gets me is, how is it bad that we don't guarantee packet delivery? (At lower levels and for some protocols.) If we put that in, say, IP, how would we then have UDP? And how is TCP's transmission guarantee not a guarantee? I mean, yes, it's possible you won't get your packet, but at the very worst you can detect that you didn't get your packet, which is about as good as it's possible to do while operating in the real world.

Reading through the article I got the same hand-wavy, smoke-blowing impression many times, which is odd given that it's about a couple of people who created the Internet. You'd think they would point out hard facts and real problems. Anybody else see something off with this article, and maybe see what agenda it's actually going for? It reads like something that belongs in the pessimistic bizarro-New Scientist.

What does Hollywood think?

Internet is like, so last year. Stone tablet and carrier pigeon are back in style this year. All the Hollywood celebs are doing it. You should too!

If we are redesigning it, can I have it..

.. in a nice shade of Ferrari Red to match my car? Thanks.

its good enough

The trouble with something like the internet is that it's "good enough", and due to it's current sheer size, creating a replacement that works better and can handle that kind of volume would be VERY expensive. It's better to replace the pieces that absolutely need packet guarantees as needed, and work outward from there. As the demand for such a service increases, the money to pay for the infrastructure replacements will become available. No company is going to throw down the multiple, multiple billions needed to get a brand new, highly "beta" internet going, when there's still so much $ to be made from the current (albeit slightly broken) version.

That's what the Internet needs-- a fork!

Yeah, let's get rid of all of those buggy and exploitable protocols and get somethings safe, serene, and a joy for ISPs to deliver.

Wait wait don't tell me....

Yeah, Internet II.

Uh oh, already been done? A worldwide OC-192 highway? Drat.

Sorry there, old salivating VC buds, perhaps it wasn't that simple. Maybe we need to look at it one step and application at a time. What-- we need to time data together so as not to cause multimedia latency issues? Drat.

The web creators call the internet outdated...

And are in the process of downloading an update via the Internet.

Phone companies

So light up a couple more fiber strands and upgrade from gig to 10gig equipment. (then from 10gig to 100gig)
But noooo, there's no money for that because the telecomms have spent all their infrastructure money on "QoS" and spying equipment.
Instead of upgrading the capacity they buy hugely powerful equipment to analyse these vast data flows and selectively reduce the quality of service.

The problem with the Internet is the big telecom companies making selfish business decisions instead of the correct technical decisions. (see Bell Canada peering)

I say we buy up the fiber for a new network and run it publicly like the roads.
Customer owned fiber is the way to go.
http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/customer.html [canarie.ca]

In other news...

Fat Cat Corporations Say Internet's Too Competitive Religious Right Says Internet's Too Dirty China Says Internet's Too Liberal Prakash Singh Says Internet's Too Expensive Al Gore Says Air's Too Free Take a number and sit down.

Packet loss doesn't affect video (too much)

Even while at ARPAnet, he says he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination. His fears crystallized in the late 1990s when he saw companies begin to use the Internet to make phone calls and consumers begin to dabble in online video.'"

Excuse me if I miss something, but isn't UDP capable of handling that kind of data? In fact, a few packets missed don't affect phone calls or online video.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol [wikipedia.org]

UDP does not guarantee reliability or ordering in the way that TCP does. Datagrams may arrive out of order, appear duplicated, or go missing without notice.
....
Common network applications that use UDP include the Domain Name System (DNS), streaming media applications such as IPTV, Voice over IP (VoIP), Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) and online games.

The foundations are based on obsolete assumptions

All of the core internet protocols are based on an obsolete assumption of what the core user base is. The internet is no longer composed primarily of trustworthy, technically savvy, geeks and scientists. So, for the past 15 years, we've been layering safety and utility layers on top of this flawed foundation. Look at the evolution of E-mail. E-mails are sent over the same SMTP sessions that used to be driven by manually-entered commands. Add to that some primitive and flawed approaches to protocol standards, and we do have a little bit of a mess. The news to me isn't that the internet is flawed, but that the IT community has managed to scale these foundation technologies into the modern internet age. Yes, it's outdated, but it also still works.

I Know What They Mean

Outdated indeed! I keep checking every day, but suck.com still hasn't been updated in over six years!

Wait a min

"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television," he says. "I know because I designed it." I thought Al Gore said that he designed that there tarraweb thingy?

We Koreans...

...wholeheartedly agree with the Web creators on this subject. Here, only old people use the Internet.

In soviet Russia.....

In soviet russia, the internet outdates you!

If only we had...

Mr. Roberts's concern over the Internet's infrastructure stretches back years. Even while at ARPAnet, he says he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination.

Gee, if only we had some method to control the transportation of packets. I envision it starting with something like a handshake between two hosts so each would know that the other was ready. Then you'd want to assign sequence numbers to each packet so the recipient would know if a packet had been dropped. The recipient might have some way to acknowledge each packet, so the sender knows that the recipient received it. And there might even be some way for either endpoint to tell the other that it's finished with the conversation, allowing timely cleanup of network resources.

Nah, I'm dreaming. If such a magic "transport control" protocol were possible, surely the inventors of the Internet would have figured it out by now.

They take the name of TBL in vain...

"Web creators", TFA says, yet I can find no mention of TBL. Are there some other Web creators around that I haven't heard of?

Easy Fix

Just replace the tubes!

From Senator Ted Stevens.......

Does that mean that when they are finished, they will have to reboot the Internet?? Man, all those tubes.....

Congestion and all that.

Having been around at the beginning, I should comment on this.

There are some fundamental problems with the way the Internet works, but hardware has saved us from having to solve them. The biggest problem is that we still can't deal effectively with congestion in the middle of a pure datagram network. We know what to do out near the edges (look up "fair queuing", which I invented), but in the middle, where there are too many flows and too little transit delay, that doesn't work.

The practical solution to the problem has been cheap long-haul bandwidth in the backbone of the network, with routers to match. Early users of the modern Internet may remember the days when MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST would choke on traffic and the whole backbone would start losing half the packets. That was solved by cheap fibre optic links. Today, we have a network where the "last mile" usually saturates before the backbone does. This is what makes the whole thing work. But we never did get a good technical solution to that problem. We have some good hacks: the congestion window in TCP and "Random Early Drop", which together sort of work. At least where most of the traffic is TCP. We still don't have equally effective ways of throttling UDP traffic.

Roberts is a virtual circuit guy. He founded Telenet, which was a virtual circuit system. (I was recruited by Telenet when they had 13 employees, but turned them down.) Telenet was a flop commercially; it didn't scale up well. Telcos love virtual circuits, because they create connections they can bill. And they keep trying to get virtual circuits into the network. X.25, ISDN, ATM, and PPPoE are virtual circuit systems, and they all came from telcos. Roberts is still pushing variations on his virtual circuit scheme.

There are continuing attempts to get some kind of billable virtual circuit thing into the network, and those attempts consistently come from telcos. There was a scheme tried for using multiple PPPoE connections over ADSL links to provide multiple classes of service, with the good ones being more expensive. That didn't fly. The whole "net neutrality" thing is about this. What telcos really want is to be able to charge based on the "value to the consumer". The wireless phone people do this, and cash in big - SMS messages cost more to send than photos. The wireline telcos see themselves being cut out of the revenue stream as video moves to the Internet. They want to create a place where they can step on the hose and cut off the flow unless you pay them extra.

I wrote the classic RFC on this [faqs.org] too many years ago. Read the section "Game Theoretic Aspects of Network Congestion". It's still valid. But, as I said above, we don't have to solve the theoretical problem as long as throwing cheap backbone bandwidth at it works. Cheap backbone bandwidth will continue to be available unless some monopoly situation develops that prevents backbone bandwidth from being provided near cost.

Fast TCP

The internet software update called 'Fast TCP' can transfer a DVD over an ocean in a second so I think it should be popular among the packets guys too?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAST_TCP [wikipedia.org]

It's not the technology

Why is it that when internet performance is discussed in the media, "solutions" always involve some new box or protocol that's supposed to make your packets move faster?

It's inadequate infrastructure as a result of the political climate. At every level.

The single largest impediment to mass consumer broadband in the West is irresponsible corporate monopolies or borg-like incumbent telecoms making life hell for consumers.

In developing nations, it is often more a case of the aforementioned telecoms making life hell for entire nations e.g. if you are a landlocked African country you have no direct access to undersea cable, so even your national incumbent telecom is screwed. And the hell of it is that various borgcoms owns so much of said undersea cable (and especially the access rights to the landing stations) that even if you are a country with access to the cable, you are still only slightly less screwed. This is why in most places in sub-Saharan Africa, it is still cheaper to send data 72000km through space via a low-bandwidth geostationary satellite link than use the optical undersea cable: there is global competition in the sat bandwidth market.

Even in the case of carrier-carrier interconnects (the "inter" part of the internet), sustained scalability relies upon the mutual goodwill of carriers to upgrade their common interconnects. If one feels the other is taking advantage of the situation, then it's no soup for the other guy. This is only fair in business of course, but it leads to congestion which impacts performance. Video hosting has recently exacerbated this issue significantly.

Something obvious to me seems to escape most folks, so I'll state it again for posterity: the internet is a media delivery system, not unlike TV, newspapers, & magazines. Most of the money going into the "internet economy" from the rest of the world comes from two places: advertisers, and consumers paying for something useful that is also used as an ad-delivery mechanism (i.e. internet access).

Google had this figured out a long time ago. Just because it's technology doesn't mean it's different.

It is in the apparent interest of large/incumbent telecoms to keep the net out of their country/market as long as possible, because net proliferation inherently means competition. This is why most French people didn't know about the net until around '99 or so; France Telecom was making truckloads of cash off the minitel since the early '80s and had no intention of changing that, so they did their best to make life hell for any ISP trying to build a business in the country. Around '99 or 2000 the government realized that they were starting to look pathetic and did something about it. In late 2001, all the FT COs were opened up to competition, and of course FT lost loads of business.

But now France has one of the best deployed broadband infrastructures in the world, and France Telecom (though forced to be competitive) is making far more revenue from triple-play services than they ever made off the minitel, because even though they only have one piece of the pie (albeit a big piece,) the broadband market has exploded, and the net has significantly increased revenue from their mobile phone division as well. If one could have told an FT executive in 1998 that in a few years they'd open up all their POPs to stiff competition but make record revenue delivering IP, voice, and TV via their existing copper and mobile infrastructure, I'd love to see his reaction...

This lesson needs to be taught everywhere that a half-decent internet connection is unavailable, including most of the US.

Some "improvements" would not be.

In one of the "related articles", mention is made that there is a great need to "declare your age" and know that if you are communicating with such-and-such Bank, that it is really them.

Nonsense.

Maybe those needs are felt in the UK, where that particular article was written, but here in the U.S. we still consider it a right for individuals to speak anonymously. I would never support, say, a scheme to attach a personal "profile" to an IP... and as for authentication, there is no way, technically, to do that without some kind of "trust authority" as the ultimate verification. And that is something we are already doing.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Not everything works perfectly, but I would not want a system where everything did, if that article's author were allowed to define perfect.

Ethernet sucks anyway...

Let's convert the internet into a giant Token Ring network where only one machine speaks at the same time. Problem solved no more collisions and lost packets !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_Ring [wikipedia.org]

packet loss is a physical layer problem

Even while at ARPAnet, he says he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination. His fears crystallized in the late 1990s when he saw companies begin to use the Internet to make phone calls and consumers begin to dabble in online video.

Hmm... I really hope this was taken out of context, otherwise he doesn't know what he is talking about. The whole point of using UDP versus TCP (which actually does tells the sender to resend lost packets) is that low latency is more important than data integrity for some content. Phone calls, in particular, require that you have as low a latency as possible. And you don't want to suddenly have your audio transmission shifted back a couple seconds to buffer the audio otherwise people will start talking over one another.

Ensuring that packets arrive at their destination is not best handled at the TCP/IP level or at any protocol level, the way to ensure that packets arrive at their destination is to have a clear physical transmission without interference. Networking protocols are for telling the sender to resend lost packets on a lossy line, or not, depending on how much you need the packet.

Net != Web, plus network neutrality

I saw a blog post recently asking about what are the next problems for a computer scientist, from someone who thought that computer scientist == programmer. This is not true. Computer science is about understanding and handling complexity, and great gobs of computer issues have little to do with that. The Nike+ deal where you can put an accelerometer in your shoe and it'll tell your iPod how far you've run and how many calories you've burned. A neat and useful thing that makes me want it, to be sure, but it's far closer to 'hello world' than the ends of computer science.

This is not Tim Berners-Lee saying that he's dissatisfied with the Web. Which I'm sure he is, as it's not nearly as Semantic as he hopes it to be, and I'm not sure if Web 2.0 counts as a step forward or back for him.

The thing about it, if you RTFA, it seems -- Last month, his start-up, Anagran Inc., introduced a piece of gear called the flow router that he says can help modernize the Internet. The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission. that they want to violate Network Neutrality. Which confuses me. It's good to favor packets from Youtube because video wants fast but not because you like Youtube?

And I always thought that the glory of the internet was that it was smart on the ends, not the middle.