New York – The university researchers who began construction on the Internet some four decades ago never imagined the power their creation would have today. They toiled away in their labs quietly, and few outside cared.
That won’t be the case with a next-generation Internet envisioned as an ultimate replacement for the current one.
Commercial and policy interests will likely play a bigger role this time as researchers explore “clean-slate” designs that scrap the Internet’s underlying architecture to better address security, mobility and other emerging needs.
Will the greater attention on these efforts ultimately be their undoing?
“The success of the Internet can be largely credited to the fact that it began in a backwater,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor affiliated with Oxford and Harvard universities. “It had the amazing advantage of not having to turn a profit. It didn’t need a business model.”
The bulk of the work is still being done in ivory towers, with grants from leading high-tech companies and government agencies.
Stanford University, for instance, has partnered with Cisco Systems Inc., Japan’s NTT DoCoMo Inc., Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG and other companies, though for now they are limited to advisory and sponsorship roles.
Bruce Davie, a Cisco fellow, said industry can take advantage of academia’s long-term vision, while giving feedback on what areas of research might actually be useful, but commercial considerations are clearly in the minds of researchers.
Carnegie Mellon professor Hui Zhang said some of the work there involves building incentives for network operators to update systems and pass along data efficiently. Researchers are realizing they can’t simply rely on network operators’ altruism, a tenet in the original design.
Participants in a new network also could include law-enforcement officials, who are already demanding that Internet service providers retrofit the existing network to ease wiretapping of Internet-based phone calls.
