I'm re-posting this entry I made yesterday due to a lack of responses (what with it being Memorial Day and all) because it is a very important issue to us as Kossacks:
The National Science Foundation has picked BBN Technologies to start work on a new computer network. Is this deja vu? Well, BBN did play a key role in creating ARPANET, the network that went on to form the internet.
While one paragraph in the Ars Technica article states:
The project isn't expected to follow ARPANET's trajectory to widespread adoption—this is not a "next generation internet." Instead, it is intended to allow computer scientists and networking engineers to test how well their ideas work under real network conditions. Dedicated fiber connections will be used to link a number of major academic institutions, which will host hardware such as remote sensors, compute clusters, and experimental wireless hardware. To facilitate such experimental uses, all of the hardware used in GENI is expected to be programmable, allowing the system to be reconfigured and updated according to users' needs and its successes and failures.
...The NSF is also hinting that the features of this parallel network may be included in the architecture of the current internet:
Although the GENI network itself won't be merged with the general-use Internet, any successful technology it produces is likely to make its way onto the public network eventually. To speed this process along the NSF is encouraging commercial entities to take part in the project.
The NSF is one of several groups that are calling for scrapping the internet
Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.
The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."
...Unfortunately, I wouldn't be excited about a redesign of the internet:
One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.
There's no evidence they are meddling yet, but once any research looks promising, "a number of people (will) want to be in the drawing room," said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor affiliated with Oxford and Harvard universities. "They'll be wearing coats and ties and spilling out of the venue."
Did anyone really think that the CIA, NSA, FBI, RIAA, MPAA, AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, Comcast, etc. would want to keep the internet as is? The only reason why individuals have so much freedom on this internet is because DARPA never intended for it to be more than a small research network. Then along came IRC, UseNET, and the World Wide Web, and the internets became that lovable and necessary series of tubes that we know today. Unfortunately, your digital privacy and net neutrality will be under seige if this new network gets merged into the current internet.