Last week our esteemed colleague from Nemertes Research Johna Till Johnson wrote that the Internet is in deep peril because: "IP itself is nearing end-of-life, with no ready alternative." To prevent what she describes as a looming crisis, Johna champions a radical new Internet architecture. Just as the sky did not fall on Chicken Little, the Internet sky is not about to fall on us.
Route scalability and address depletion problems do not yet constitute a crisis, and folks responsible for Internet infrastructure will continue to take steps to keep things running (more on this in upcoming posts). Measured technical and political means will get us where we need to go--redesigning the Internet from scratch will not.
In Boston last week we attended the Pouzin Society organizational meetings and the FutureNet Conference Beer and Pizza "Shootout": Will Route Scalability and Address Depletion Create "The Perfect Storm?" The consistent drumbeat from Johna and other presenters was that the Internet can't continue in its present form. Internet pioneer Mike O'Dell told Shootout attendees: "We are getting what we wrought, but we wrought the wrong thing," and John Day told the crowd that, "what was once good enough has led us through the woods to a dead end."
We can debate the gravity and urgency of the Internet's scaling problems, but the solution is certainly not the mid-flight wing and engine change proposed by the Pouzin Society. In our view the Internet will evolve to accommodate growth as it has until now. The architecture proposed by John Day is so radically different it is inconceivable it could be built in our lifetime. For starters it requires replacing or upgrading every one of the billions of endstations running the TCP/IP protocol stack. Although the proposed architecture is not fully defined, the part presented in the May 4th meeting has serious issues. It replaces addresses with names for applications and locations. To avoid scaling limits, there is no central registry for these names. All networks will be built by ISPs that can provide different services and different trust levels.
You will be forced to trust that your ISP will send you to the real Google rather than its own version of Google. Despite the fact that Pouzin Society members express distaste for walled gardens, the architecture actually encourages them. The architecture is so diffuse and unstructured that communication paths will be a created from a long series of rendezvous and discoveries before actually sending data to a destination. One attendee remarked that this could degenerate into something akin to an elaborate Italian banking transaction requiring multiple transactions before you can deposit money.
But let us assume that the John Day architecture sorts this out and becomes a viable alternative to today's Internet. The Pouzin Society is in no hurry to get there. The project needs an architecture description, protocol specifications, a development toolkit, experimental implementations, system evaluations, and revisions to get it all right. The group is keen on getting it right lest they repeat mistakes of the past. Mike O'Dell repeatedly warned against an early public demo of the technology because in his view, "The Arpanet was a demo that got accepted as a working system before it was finished. We don't want to make that mistake again."
The bottom line is that even if there is an impending scaling crisis as Johna foretells, the John Day architecture will not be in place soon enough. That aside, the architecture will have its own growth issues that are simply not yet well understood.
Why bet on an unproven radical change when reasonable modest changes will do the job?
We will propose such a modest set of changes in upcoming posts.
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Internet Sky Falling?
Like Microsoft's definition of "trustworthy computing", all they really want is to end anonymity and bill you for your time. Think about re-writing the U.S. Constitution, with your elected representatives on the payroll of the drug companies, the telecoms, the banks, etc., just as they are now. New and improved. For whom?
Thank You!
Thank you for your counter opinion to the completely ridiculous “Internet Sky is Falling” article. I can’t agree more that there are always infrastructure challenges wrapping around the Internet, but we (the nameless geeks) that keep the Internet afloat on a daily basis. Strategic vision is important, but not at the cost causing ill-founded panic on a global scale.
Some Reality Please
You are right! For over 19 years I have used the internet. My associates and I have bee deeply involved in designing the communication infrastructure for the next generation, and our test have been successful to the extend that we have started the implementation....Guess what: we have followed the discussions on the internet structure and the consequences of what we are doing are directly related to the future of the internet.
Whatever doomsday messages are published, they are plain wrong. The internet, as it is, can evolve and grow and safeguard that its benefits continue, with the freedom embedded in it, AND the adoption of all the provisions needed to handle vastly increased trafic PLUS the absolute essential backward compatibility...
Flag Day (pun intended)
I participated in the last flag day, 1/1/83 when we ditched NCP (the Arpanet protocols) and shifted to TCP/IP. The world was small then -- a few thousand end points to deal with. And the whole world was not dependent on networking as it surely is now.
So there will never be another flag day in networking. We can take the excellent ideas of the Pouzin Society and kludge them on to the Internet as we have it. NAT was a temporary kludge to help with running out of addresses. NAT has served well. More kludges will take place. Bet on it.
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