{"id":192,"date":"2005-12-21T13:14:40","date_gmt":"2005-12-21T20:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=192"},"modified":"2005-12-21T13:14:40","modified_gmt":"2005-12-21T20:14:40","slug":"is_the_internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=192","title":{"rendered":"Is the internet too dumb to survive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe Bob Metcalfe was just ten years too early. If you remember, Metcalfe in 1995 wrote a column predicting that the net would “go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” He later ate his words – literally<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The current issue of MIT’s Technology Review, which, coincidentally, has Metcalfe on its board, features dark new predictions about the net. In a cover story called The Internet Is Broken<\/a>, David Talbot suggests that the internet, designed for fairly simple communications between fairly small groups, may finally be cracking under the weight of its ever growing complexity. He writes that “for the average user, the Internet these days all too often resembles New York’s Times Square in the 1980s. It was exciting and vibrant, but you made sure to keep your head down, lest you be offered drugs, robbed, or harangued by the insane. Times Square has been cleaned up, but the Internet keeps getting worse, both at the user’s level, and … deep within its architecture.”<\/p>\n

Talbot quotes some heavy hitters. Here’s MIT’s David Clark: “We are at an inflection point, a revolution point … We might just be at the point where the utility of the Internet stalls – and perhaps turns downward.” Here’s Jonathan Zittrain, formerly of Harvard, now at Oxford: “Take any of the top ten viruses and add a bit of poison to them, and most of the world wakes up on a Tuesday morning unable to surf the Net – or finding much less there if it can.” Princeton’s Larry Peterson explains how the myriad patchwork fixes to the net’s security problems ultimately magnify the system’s fragility: “We see vulnerability, we try to patch it. That approach is one that has worked for 30 years. But there is reason to be concerned. Without a long-term plan, if you are just patching the next problem you see, you end up with an increasingly complex and brittle system.”<\/p>\n

Talbot reports on some ongoing efforts, notably a program at the National Science Foundation, to reengineer the net – to “develop clean-slate architectures that provide security, accommodate new technologies, and are easier to manage.” They aim, for instance, to build into the net “the ability to authenticate whom you are communicating with and prevent things like spam and viruses from ever reaching your PC.” They also include the design of “protocols that allow Internet service providers to better route traffic and collaborate to offer advanced services without compromising their businesses” as well as mechanisms to “allow all pieces of the network to detect and report emerging problems – whether technical breakdowns, traffic jams, or replicating worms – to network administrators.” In short, these initiatives seek to make the internet smarter.<\/p>\n

Which, of course, means they run counter to the internet’s native grain. From the start, many have argued that the internet’s greatest strength is its essential stupidity – the inability of its pipes to distinguish between the different bits of data running through them. That dumbness is one of the main reasons the net’s so flexible and fast, and it also lies at the heart of what Talbot calls “the libertarian culture of the Internet.” Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, now with Google, says, “It’s really hard to have a network-level thing do this stuff, which means you have to assemble the packets into something bigger and thus violate all the protocols.”<\/p>\n

The tension between security and openness, manageability and freedom, has always been around, of course. But, as Talbot’s article makes clear, the day when that tension is resolved may be approaching. Princeton’s Peterson, for instance, reports that “there is a wider recognition in the highest level of the government [of the seriousness of the problems]. We are getting to the point where we are briefing people in the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. I specifically did, and other people are doing that as well. As far as I know, that’s pretty new.”<\/p>\n

The internet has become an essential infrastructure – not just for communication but for commerce. When the workings of national economies hinge on an infrastructure’s reliability and security, then you can be sure that reliability and security will in the end come to trump all other concerns, even openness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe Bob Metcalfe was just ten years too early. If you remember, Metcalfe in 1995 wrote a column predicting that the net would “go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” He later ate his words – literally. The current issue of MIT’s Technology Review, which, coincidentally, has Metcalfe on its board, features dark new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}