A clean slate for the Internet

GENI's young turks

"Not only is the Internet having a midlife crisis; so is the Internet research community," says clean-slate Internet researcher Nick McKeown, of Stanford University. "Most of the people involved in the original Internet are near the ends of their careers or have retired."

He says younger researchers were frustrated by a prevailing view that any change to the Internet had to be "backward-compatible" so as not to disrupt users, a requirement that dictated modest, incremental change.

"When the current cohort [of researchers] reached midlife, got tenure and so on, we realized that it's time to try and break from the trap of incrementalism," says Mc­Keown, 43. "We said, 'You know, we are part of the problem now, but we should be part of the solution.' Hence, GENI was born."

Making it happen

If history is any guide, we aren't going to wake up one day and find ourselves using a clean-slate Internet. Robert Kahn was a key architect of the Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet, at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1970s and early 1980s. He presided over the conversion of the Arpanet from its original Network Control Protocol to TCP/IP in 1983.

"There were hundreds of computers on the Arpanet at the time," Kahn recalls. "They had a year or two of warning, but a week before the transition actually occurred, people were still asking me, 'Is it really going to happen?' When we said yes, they said, 'Well, you know it's going to take us a while to get ready.' So we had to run the old and new protocols in parallel for close to six months."

Most of the facilities in question were DARPA-funded and so were at least partly under Kahn's control. "It's a much more complex problem when there is no central party controlling everything," he says. "Today, no one party could effectively orchestrate that."