Not everyone agrees with that assessment. “The argument often is that you need a clean-slate Internet because the current Internet has a lot of problems — a lack of security, viruses, spam, that kind of thing,” says Internet pioneer Robert Kahn, a co-inventor of TCP/IP. “But most of those are not issues that a brand-new structure is likely to solve all by itself.”
A Few FIND Projects | |
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Kahn, who’s now CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va., points out, for example, that what is deemed to be spam or even pornography can vary depending on who is viewing it, and he notes that the application of technological solutions for such problems introduces other social issues, such as concerns about privacy and censorship. “The reason we don’t have security in the current Internet isn’t solely a technical matter,” he says.
And it’s worth noting again that not all of the NSF’s FIND and GENI projects deal solely with technology. “We are suggesting that a lot of the security projects should have a social collaborator,” Mankin says. “You are not going to change society, but you can help with some changes to technology.”
Kahn says clean-slate proposals may involve changes to the networks themselves, to computers, to operating systems or to major classes of applications. “You don’t do these things lightly,” he says. “The implications are pretty profound across the board.”
Given the difficulties, does it make sense to seek a clean slate? “Absolutely,” Kahn says. “If there are really good ideas — that’s the heart of it.”
Clean Slates, Testbeds and Emulators | |
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