CNET: Is the end of the Internet upon us?

[Triana]

By Molly Wood, executive editor, CNET.com
Monday, March 13, 2006
Molly Wood

A whole lot of guns are lined up against the Net right now: Net neutrality/two-tiered Internet issues; increasing discomfort over the U.S. control of Internet operation; China's moves to create its own domain system (a possible prelude to a new, country-specific, alternate root system); supposition that, with Vint Cerf and a bunch of dark fiber in hand, Google might be looking to create its own Internet--and of course, there are the viruses, the spam, the scourge on young people that is MySpace, and, how could I forget...porn and pop-ups.

Basically, I'm starting to wonder if the one-Internet-for-all paradigm we've enjoyed so far is about to break and if we can expect a future where we all use smaller, private, for-profit or nonprofit, corporate, and/or political Internets according to our various locations and interests. Let me put it this way: it's all too likely that George W. Bush didn't misspeak when he mentioned "the Internets." The military has probably already built an alternate Internet--if not more than one, and it's looking all too possible that the Net itself is about to fracture into a mess of cliques, privately owned networks, and glorified Usenets.

Breaking what's broken

From a purely technical standpoint, the current Internet architecture has some problems. Many people, including the folks who originally helped build the sucker, think it's just about tapped out in terms of spam, viruses, DoS attacks, increasing numbers of users, and new types of bandwidth-hogging devices (cell phones, DVRs, Xboxes, cars, Wi-Fi-enabled everything). And as a consortium of Internet pioneers and up-and-coming engineers work on ways to fix the current structure, they're starting to eyeball something called metanets as a possible way to let multiple Internets run in parallel, routing communications into ever-emerging protocols that are specifically tailored for, say, streaming video.

Meanwhile, a whole mess of political and commercial troubles face the Net. The telcos, who see the Internet as a delivery medium that they control, want to try to charge content providers a second time for that delivery--first, for using the bandwidth in the first place (the current pay structure), then again for "prioritized delivery" of that content. The scheme is called tiered Internet, and it would create classes of content delivery the way airplanes currently have classes of seating. Companies that could pay what Preston Gralla has so eloquently dubbed cyberextortion would have a better chance of seeing their content delivered in a timely and reliable fashion.

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http://www.cnet.com/4520-6033_1-6462835-1.html?tag=nl.e501

[mainegreen]

1. The end of the internet has been going on for a while now hasn't it?

[BootinUp]

2. Where's Al Gore when you need him?

:sarcasm: