Lots of people are looking into internet architecture and trying to imagine a better, sexier internet. The biggest project doing so is the NewArch Project: Future-Generation Internet Architecture, and near as I can tell everyone is talking about how to add smarts into the network. I want a dumber network. I want a network that is stupider in every way.
Right now we’re seeing complexity biting people in the butt constantly on NANOG. And people think that anything even marginally more complex than what exists has any chance of adoption?
The supercomputing community is progressing towards stupidity as well – modern supercomputers (DeepBlue and the like) are lots of really really simple and RISC-ish processors proceeding massively in parallel. Stupid and simple makes things faster and more speedupable.
I think that we’re not giving the edges of the internet enough credit – put even MORE smarts at the edge and then see what you’ll get. Let’s start letting people join in massive CHORD/CAN type DHTs and eliminate the DNS system (it’ll need some PKI or web-of-trust stuff thrown in, but all that takes is cycles, and there’s a lot of those out there). Let’s just wire things together and let landmark routing take it away. When you wire yourself in, broadcast your local segment if there’s a leader. If you get no response, then it’s you. Now you’re a router! Let’s see your best effort! A dumber network is the goal – the question isn’t “what can we put into the network”, the question is “what can we remove”.
I think we can remove DNS. We might be able to eliminate BGP. What would we get then?
