The internet is broken [MIT Technology Review]

Internet_is_broken
The Net’s basic flaws cost firms billions, impede innovation, and threaten national security. We simply can’t keep patching the Internet’s security holes. While researchers are working to make the Internet smarter, experts like Google’s Vinton Cerf warn that this could make it even slower. It’s time for a clean-slate approach, says MIT’s David D. Clark.

As Nicholas Carr reports, “The current issue of MIT’s Technology Review features dark new predictions about the net. In the story
David Talbot suggests that the internet, designed for fairly simple communications between fairly small groups, may finally be cracking under the weight of its ever growing complexity. He writes that “for
the average user, the Internet these days all too often resembles New York’s Times Square in the 1980s. It was exciting and vibrant, but you made sure to keep your head down, lest you be offered drugs, robbed, or harangued by the insane. Times Square has been cleaned up, but the Internet keeps getting worse, both at the user’s level, and … deep within its architecture.””

The article — the cover story in Technology Review’s December 2005/January 2006 print issue — has been divided into three online parts: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

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