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March 8, 2009
Future Internet Meme
So the internet crowd was asked Do We Need a New Internet? and John Markoff's article in the New York Times has induced an interesting response from the Slashdot and Digg crowd.
![7 maart - NU FUTURE: Het Grote Recessiefeest by De Balie [flickr]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3325/3312248797_1be1b262b5.jpg?v=0)
Its mostly negative such as this punchline from Milton Mueller at CiricleID
people who say that we can fix the problems of the Internet by developing a "new" Internet are saying, in effect, that we can undo history and start over again..
Ed Felten plainly says No Thanks and argues that
The Net, like any large human-built institution, is far from perfect -- but that doesn't mean that we would be better off tearing it down and starting over.
David Akin reckons the Internet may just Need new Users. The short answers in all these items seems to be an Almost Certainly, No and for the long answer ... well I'll leave that to one Gene Spafford, one of the quoted interviewees for the NY Times piece, Gene thinks the
Internet itself is not the biggest problem. Rather, it is the endpoints, the policies, the economics, and the legal environment that make things so difficult..
Posted by miguelpdl at March 8, 2009 9:02 PM
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Comments
"but that doesn't mean that we would be better off tearing it down and starting over."
That sums it up for me. No guarantee the future internet would successfully address the problems it means to (addressing, security, identity, anonymity etc.) without introducing new problems. And the transition would not be painless. Plenty of nodes out there on the current net that are quite happy and wouldn't see the benefit of transitioning. Other nodes that would actively fight the transition as they see loss of anonymity etc.
Maybe we should wait for the quantum net to be possible before we make such a huge change ;)
Posted by: Paul Watson at March 12, 2009 12:07 PM