Two days after the Internet TV platform Joost
went public, The Wall Street Journal publishes an article on two of the
Internet’s pioneers, calling the technology powering the Internet
‘outdated’. 69 Year old Larry Roberts, project owner of ARPAnet (which
was the very first version of the Internet), and Len Bosack, 55 and
founder of the networking giant CISCO are both looking for a solution.
“The Internet wasn’t designed for people to watch television. I know because I designed it.” Dixit Mr. Roberts.
It’s a simple fact that much of the building blocks of the
present-day Internet are pretty close to retirement indeed. Think for
instance email : the protocol used for sending email (the SMTP
protocol) still dates from the very early days of the Internet and was
never designed to support sending zillions of emails every day. As was
it never designed to support authentication … which is the real problem
in fighting spam. But also IP addresses are running out, resulting in a
difficult roll-out of a new IP address format (known as IPv6) and access lines get clogged by the massive amounts of data resulting in Google hiring a submarine cable negotiator.
And why not -in the process of redesigning- try to lower the energy consumption of the Internet?
Let’s hope mr. Roberts and mr. Bosack can work their magic once again…
Read the full Wall Street Journal article
