Building the next Internet

The Internet’s rapid rise and impending fall has been amazing to witness. Sure, technically it’s been around for 30-plus years, but for most of humanity, the Internet showed up in 1997. In those brief 15 years, the baboons of ignorance and greed have been doing their damnedest to destroy it, as this SOPA and PIPA nonsense clearly exhibits. Even if they’ve been shelved or postponed for now due to the massive and highly publicized backlash, they’re guaranteed to return in a different disguise sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, those of us who built the thing have been trying to keep it going. The Internet started off like an Airstream camper from the 1960s: a sleek and futuristic symbol of a new era, a shiny vehicle that would take us to unexplored frontiers. But instead of transporting us to, say, the Painted Desert, it would bring us to a golden age of knowledge and enlightenment. It would carry us to the next level for humanity. For a brief period of time, it was all those things, and it was glorious — a bit slow, but glorious.

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The Internet of today still resembles that trailer, but we’ve bolted a few jet engines to the rear end and used a ton of J-B Weld to glue on new parts and try to keep the older, critical components together, all while rocketing toward the horizon at a breakneck pace.

The whole time, those baboons keep throwing bombs from the side of the road.

The Internet began and grew organically. It was constrained by the limits of technology, which caused it to be used and appreciated by a select few for many years. The advent of faster links, better protocols, and — most important — pictures brought it into popular conciousness.

But at that point, the basics were in place, the frameworks were solid, and technological advances in high-speed and long-distance data transmission allowed for monumental growth that brought us to where we find ourselves today. The fact that the continued exponential growth of the Internet has caused no significant problems to date is a thundering testament to the minds that developed those core concepts.

But there are gaps and fissures, such as the dismal state of security, the corruption of SMTP due to spam, and other plights. In time, those issues could be dealt with and fixed. The real problem is that the baboons are using larger bombs and are getting way more accurate.

At what point do we decide to jettison the thing and start anew? And what would a new Internet look like?

The Internet was built by computer scientists and originally funded by the U.S. government. Nothing like it had ever existed, so every step was uncharted. In staring at that blank page today, the ghosts of three decades of precedence haunt the mind.

Where there was no need or even possibility for deep packet inspection back in 1985, it’s a regularity today. Where the concept of DRM existed only in scrambled Cinemax channels, there are a bevy of horrid examples of DRM in use today. I shudder to think of the “architectual” meetings that would be held regarding core-level DRM and censorship implementations, concepts that are anathema to the distributed, dumb core/smart edge founding principals of the Internet. The original idea was resilience, not control. The outcome of any modern effort to build a new Internet is guaranteed to be laden with technically invalid concessions to industry, rendering it weak, unstable, and ultimately useless.

A new Internet built that way isn’t possible. The cat’s out of the bag. Too many monied interests now know what’s out there in that previously uncharted territory, and they’re determined to ravage it for all they can and prevent any meaningful replacement that they don’t control.

I don’t think it’ll be Internet2 either; heck, they couldn’t even get it together to merge with National LambdaRail a few years ago. It’s a great network, but isn’t destined to be anything more than a very fast, yet small-footprint, limited endeavor.

The next Internet won’t be built by design. Rather, it’ll be created organically, from within the carcass of the current iteration. It’ll be built with more J-B Weld and bolt-on parts. It’ll be a mishmash of anonymous gateways, including Tor, private VPNs, anonymizing proxies, darknets, and subterfuge. It will be used to share information, data, and personal communication, but in a way that evades heavy-handed censorship from government and industry. It will laugh at attempts to constrain or control it. It will always be several steps ahead of the baboons.

It already exists — but most of the world hasn’t discovered it yet.

This story, “Building the next Internet” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.