Researchers Call for Clean Internet Slate

By Greg McNevin

April 17, 2007: While it has taken the better part of four decades for the internet to get to where it is today, the explosion of computing power and bandwidth has led some US researchers to argue that a fresh start is needed to achieve stability and security, and cure many of the ills ailing today’s web.

The internet has grown well beyond what it was originally designed for, leaving a mesh of different technologies arguably jury-rigged to work together on top of infrastructure built well before broadband and quad-core cpu’s were dreamed up. And while it works well for some applications, according to Rutgers University professor Dipankar Raychaudhuri it’s a miracle that the web works as well as it does today.

Raychaudhuri is one of a growing number of voices calling for a clean slate and radical re-thinking of underlying architecture to improve future traffic flow and quell security concerns for starters.

According to AustralianIT, universities such as Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among US universities researching clean slate projects. The US Department of Defence is also looking into a system, as is the European Union with its Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE).

If one of the competing projects gets off the ground, billions will be required to update infrastructure, hardware and software, with the new internet growing slowly over a period of around 15 years before a complete switch over is made.

This time around too, instead of a bunch of computer geeks plugging away in a basement on their own there will be a lot of eyes following the development of the real Web2.0.

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