For the past few decades, a huge network infrastructure has provided billions of people with access to information and technology that was inconceivable to earlier generations.
But if the cybergelicals of the 1990s were right about how the Internet would transform everyday life, they were less prophetic about what exactly those transformations would look like. As the number of users and applications has expanded, so have the frustrations and risks of plugging in.
This week, the United States banned soldiers from websites such as YouTube and MySpace – concerned that downloads and social networking could overload military systems and lead to security breaches. Some banks have reverted to snail mail to help customers steer clear of phishers trying to bilk them out of their money.
“Over all, the situation is not getting better, it's getting worse,” says David Clark, a senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the early creators of the Internet.
He points out that thousands of researchers have been trying to remedy Internet security issues, among other flaws, for decades. “We're not going to get there by trying harder, but by trying different.”
Which is why a growing number of programmers and network specialists – increasingly skeptical about jury-rigging solutions for today's sprawling, technically discordant Internet – are asking a seemingly heretical question: Should we throw out the Web and start over?
Last month, a group of computer scientists at Stanford University in California formally launched a research program called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet Project. Their goal is to reimagine the Web's basic architecture.
“It's a fundamental change in thinking,” says Nick McKeown, an associate professor at Stanford who directs research at Clean Slate. “Instead of trying to fix problems for today, we're trying to figure out what the Internet should look like in 15 years.”
THE SERVER IS BUSY
The progenitor of the Internet was first launched in the 1960s by the U.S. Department of Defence. Concerned about communications in the event of a crippling disaster, such as a nuclear attack, they funded experiments in the military applications of network technology.
The National Science Foundation also saw the potential of networking. By the 1980s, their researchers rapidly expanded the technology in the hopes of connecting academics and scientists across the country – eventually developing a fluid, egalitarian system that would form the backbone of the Web as we know it.
As now-popular mythology has it, the democratic – almost anti-authoritarian – nature of burgeoning Internet culture also helped it make the leap from scholars trading thesis drafts to mainstream use. And ultimately deepened the potential of the network.
But ironically the Internet's openness is also its albatross. Because of ad-hoc innovations, the Web has become a kind of unwieldy trailer park of technology – where security and even fundamental stability remain highly problematic.
For example, early adopters and researchers weren't worried about an interminable stream of e-mail from strangers hawking Viagra or spammers posing as eBay asking for personal financial data, so security has been developed in a patchwork manner.
The Internet was not designed for Second Life or “adult entertainment” videos either – high-volume, resource-consuming uses of the network. If just 1 per cent of the DVDs that NetFlicks sends to customers every day were downloaded, we would need a tenfold increase in the current core capacity of the Internet.
The Internet was also created for static, wired computer-to-computer communication, not for the burgeoning demand for mobile connectivity. While people now get e-mail and browse the Web on PDAs and cellphones, that online connection is being tunnelled through cellphone network providers, which offer a much smaller bandwidth capacity.
All of this leaves today's geeks with daunting problems and few easy fixes. Which might explain why most have stuck to the same basic assumptions about the Internet as early founders – simply propping up the old network as they go.
“In every other high-tech field, it's usually typical to see massive innovation,” Prof. McKeown says. “And although we've seen huge implementation of new applications, Internet technology is built on the same ideas it was built on 40 years ago.”
Still, after you get a flat tire, you can drive on the rim for only so long before you have to pull over, or risk worse damage. This is why Guru Parulkar has long advocated the “clean slate” solution. Currently the director of programming for the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., he believes that the Internet has become dangerously “ossified.”
