TrendThe bumpy road to a better Internet

No one could have predicted the rapid growth of the Internet, and the many uses people and busiensses would fiorn for it. Scientists are now working on a successor to the Internet — a system which, among many other things, will cut online crime, tackle child pornography, halt crippling viruses, and get rid of spam. Researchers in the United States want some $350 million to build the Global Environment for Network Innovations(Geni), promoted by some as the possible replacement for today’s internet. In Europe, similar projects are under way as part of the EU’s Future and Internet Research (Fire) program, which is expected to cost at least £27 million.

The Guardian’s Bobbi Johnson writes that with online crime rising and traffic increasing rapidly, some academics believe it is time to have a serious discussion about what succeeds today’s internet. “There’s a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you’re talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you’re really doing so,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. At present, only clumsy methods are available to approach such problems. The result: last year alone, identity theft and online fraud cost British victims an estimated £414 million, while one recent report claimed 93 percent of all e-mail sent from the United Kingdom was spam.

Geni’s backers hope that it can find answers to these problems. It is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and has a timescale of 10-15 years. Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, is working on alternative systems but says making progress is tough. “People keep trying to evolve the network, but it hasn’t really changed in 20 years,” he said. “Once you’ve built something as large and complex as the Internet it is difficult to start over again.” One of Prof. Raychaudhuri’s projects involves short-range communication. The technology could be put inside cars, allowing them to talk to each other, and other systems, to bring long-held visions of safer, automated driving into reality. Another option is to spread information around the planet in a different way: Rather than scattering small pieces of the network across hundreds of millions of computers like puzzle pieces, each containing one tiny piece of the Internet, alternative systems could be able to keep a local copy of the net. Instead of surfing in public view, users would spend much of their time wandering around inside their own computers — as if they were in a walled garden — leaving them less vulnerable to attacks from hackers and criminals.

One major difference between Internet past and Internet future is the question of government support. In the old days — that is, some forty years ago — Arpanet, the forerunner of today’s Internet, was funded by the American government for experimental research. American computer scientists in the past thus relied on government money, but current computer scientists they have had less support from the Bush administration, which has substantially reduced funding and diverted money instead into homeland security projects. With those limitations in mind, some experts have warned that starting from scratch is a gamble. Jon Crowcroft, Marconi professor at Cambridge University and one of Britain’s foremost Internet engineers, is among those who do not believe a clean-slate approach is necessarily the way forward. “There’s a risk in doing completely blue-sky research that fixes a problem but then turns out to be useless at the things the internet did well,” he said. “There aren’t that many who can do a clean-slate design