The Internet (smart vs. dumb debate) reborn

Academics have to earn their pay somehow, and lately, a lot of them have once again been spending more time trying to reinvent the Internet than fixing our education system. I say that with a certain bitter memory from the dot-com bubble years, when so many academics (and ultimately, a short-lived boomlet of vendors) labored so long to bring "smart" networking to the masses. Guess what, it never happened. Instead, we have an ever-more-pervasive dumb network which is killing "smart" network applications left and right, leaving "best effort" applications and certain assault from malicious code and denial-of-service attacks. Rather than fix the problem at the (Windows) client, where it mostly stems from, academics are now trying to build yet another (how many prototypes have we had in the past 20 years?) "intelligent" Internet, where "smart" routers intercept malicious code, give quality of service, and so on. Amazingly, some corporate researchers have climbed on board this new effort for the ride. And just to grease the skids, the news organization highlighting this is an arm of MIT.

Well guess what. While these efforts stumble forward, the real Internet faces a political firestorm that is inexorably driving us towards desktops and other clients we don't entirely control anymore, rather than real, workable, scalable, "intelligent" middle pieces.

I try to be open-minded about whatever academia is working on, since I don't claim to be smarter than any of them. But I fail to see just how these new efforts can succeed without some devilish tradeoffs, either in terms of an Net that's simply not as open -- more a series of firewalls, really -- instead of one where every Net user is somehow empowered to take control of their own authentication, security and privacy. None of the "dumb network" gurus, notably David Isenberg, have ever satisfactorily solved their most vexing problem -- the denial-of-service attack -- and this singular fact has allowed visions of a radically "smarter" if perhaps more closed Internet -- to continue to be reborn year after year.