Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the internet, some university researchers with the US government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.
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 Sep 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.” No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the internet’s underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.
Even Vinton Cerf, one of the internet’s founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was “generally healthy” because the current technology “does not satisfy all needs.”
One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies.
The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.
The National Science Foundation wants to build an experimental research network known as the Global Environment for Network Innovations, (GENI), and is funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design ( FIND).
Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the universities pursuing individual projects. Other government agencies, including the defence department, have also been exploring the concept.
The EU has also backed research on such initiatives, through a programme known as Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE). Government officials and researchers met last month in Zurich to discuss early findings and goals.
While having this in your pocket will probably make you the victim of some "Are you just happy to see me?" jokes, this roll-up phone seems like a neat idea—we're all for smaller, rather than larger, gadgets (unless it's a screen of some sort). The keypad "roll" might get a little annoying when you're trying to quickly dial a number, but the flexible screen and tight design make me want to look past that. It's better than a touchscreen with no tactile feedback at all, anyway. Was that an iPhone knock? Oh snap! 
