Re: WORTH READING Researchers Explore Scrapping Internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Date: April 14, 2007 8:47:19 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Researchers Explore Scrapping Internet

The original Internet was not a "clean slate" approach.   It  
explicitly focused on how to make all networks (existing ones and  
future ones that would be invented) *interoperable*.

That's why the Internet focused on the hard problem of  
interoperability, and not the fancy problems that were the domain of  
communications theorists - those who constructed problems in simple  
domains so they could prove "optimality" with paper studies or  
limited prototypes.

There remain very hard problems that relate to world-scale  
networking.  Issues of privacy, power relationships, evolution in a  
practical stepwise manner.

There is lots of stuff to do in the future of networking - many  
unsolved problems amenable to academic and industrial research.

But I personally suspect that the idea that the Internet was a "clean  
slate" approach in 1975 will cause those who promote the new effort  
to construct what is called a "second system" by Fred Brooks.

Those who are proposing this venture or boondoggle are practicing a  
version of "cargo cult" thinking, if they are not careful to  
understand that the Internet was grounded in struggle with some real  
problems that had huge *societal* implications - not just searching  
for a way to pay for mathematical or programming research.


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