No one can deny the impact the Internet has had on our world, yet it has giant flaws which cannot be fixed. Many consider the Internet the driving factor of the Third Industrial Revolution. It’s transformed the way we live, work, and play. Yet with all this good, the Internet has long outlived it’s initial purpose, and now it does a very poor job at the tasks required today. A new type of network is required to support today's applications with security, quality of service (QoS), and accountability. I’m hardly the first to propose this, articles by Meny Barzilay Building a brand-new Internet and David Baker The internet is broken are just a couple that describe the ways the Internet of yesterday doesn’t meet the needs today.
The Internet is missing security. A huge problem with the current internet is it’s inability to provide authentication. By design, the internet doesn’t provide any information about you as a user. You can connect to an IP network without providing any information and send and receive packets without restriction. You can sign up for an internet service as Mickey Mouse and no one will question it. This is fine at times, but for most applications today we need to be authenticated. This means that every organization who want’s to offer a service on the internet needs to reinvent the wheel on how to authenticate users. To make things worse, someone on the other side of the world can try to log into your Gmail account on a server in a US data center and it’s up to Google to try and figure out if the connection is you or someone posing as you. This any-to-any relationship of the internet allows for all sorts of security attacks including DDoS. This is just the tip of the iceberg for security issues and I can’t possibly cover all of them here.
The current Internet which is built on the IP protocol is missing consistent Quality of Service, aka QoS. Quality of Service is handling of different types of traffic with differing performance characteristics. Here’s an example. Say your at your house on a video call, and you decide to download a large file while on the call. Next thing you know your video call is cutting out and your coworkers can’t hear you. Why is this happening? What’s happening here is that the file download is using all of the available Internet bandwidth choking out your video call causing some bits of the call to be dropped. This is because the Internet doesn’t employ any QoS. If it did, it would be able to identify the video call as a priority service and ensure that those data packets get priority over your file download. This seems simple, but it actually requires all devices on the network to agree and handle data packets the same way. Your cell phone does this today, however the Internet as a whole doesn’t and that’s a huge problem. This problem will continue to compound as we put more and more devices on the Internet.
Accountability is a strange thing to talk about with respect to the Internet so hear me out. If I ask ordinary people what distributed networks they use today, none come to mind. The Web itself is a kind of distributed network, however when people use applications they choose centralized options. There are distributed or federated options out there but they aren’t as popular as their centralized options. Why is this? Mastodon, a very good federated social network similar to Twitter has something over 1 million subscribers where Twitter itself has around 465 million users at the time of writing. I argue it’s lack of accountability. Without a company making profits and reinvesting those profits in equipment, human capital, and customer service, the public isn’t interested in it. They want to have someone to call at 8pm on a Saturday if they’re having issues, and distributed networks don’t provide that generally.
I propose a new type of Internet. This new Internet doesn’t exist yet to my knowledge, but if successful would have support for things described here such as Authentication and Authorization, QoS, and Accountability. It very well could be an overlay network on top of the current Internet much like the Internet was an overlay on the telecommunications network (dial-up). This new Internet would allow you to backup your pictures from your phone to your home NAS without using an intermediary service. It would also allow you to replicate your NAS files to a neighbor or family member if you choose with little effort. Sure, these things can be done on an IP network today, but require extensive setup or the use of a 3rd party service. Since Authentication and Authorization are part of this new transport network, this allows individuals to grant permissions to others to view or manage their data or services. This new Internet could have a major impact on how we live our digital lives in our Internet village, it would provide built in guarantees to organizations providing services, and it would provide comparatively amazing security.
