Alex Singleton | Journalist and political commentator

Various US government-funded researchers, spearheaded by the National Science Foundation, are exploring the idea that today’s internet should be scrapped and replaced by a properly-designed alternative. According to MSNBC:

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.

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.”

TechDirt, however, sounds some words of caution:

The whole question sounds analogous to the debate between free markets and central planning. If you believe that complex systems need a high level of planning in order to work, it would seem miraculous that a free market system could remain relatively stable and efficient. But history has shown that, if anything, it’s the centrally planned economies that more often go haywire. Perhaps the internet question should be turned around: why should we trust that a rebuilt internet, that was designed to fix the problems that we can imagine today, would be able to accommodate completely unforeseen issues that arise 40 years down the road?