Internet evolution problem

I would like to say that Internet systematics (IS), as a framework of ideas about the nature of Network, set the controls to the issue of Internet evolution quite early in its course of unfolding.


Certainly IS was not influenced by the problems that have emerged over the good years of its
tremendous growth (scaling, multimedia, informational resources, routing, security) but only
from my need to understand its fundamentals. I concentrated on its whole system aspects because this was the only available paradigm I possessed (distributed computing as implementation of Functional Programming (FP) ) at the time of my job assignment (+).

Getting into development tasks and community participation real experience gradually was acquired and provided the real ground to walk on.

The whole system approach (aka macroscopic model) triggered the evolution cognitive alarm. Turchin's MSTT provided the reference model to try to use as a modeling mechanism.

The facinating thing with MSTT was that it made me understand the problem of why the PC made the scene instead of the LISP machine (*) (build by Thinking Machines inc.) but most important it gave me a stairway to start ascending towards the idea of "network theory". I coined the name "NET8 - Net theta)" to signal the intention.

It has been some time now that grand-scale evolution, not just the next killer appl that evolves the Network but the whole wide system scale change/replacement/re-design is stated as a problem. No doubt the following gathering will produce some interesting thread:


Reinventing the Internet - Can We and How Would We?

It has been said that no one engineered the Internet; rather it was cobbled together over time to address real and emerging needs. That cobbling built on the work of those who laid the foundations and necessarily required compromises to maintain compatibility. This panel will explore the hard problems challenging the Internet as we know it today, what we might do differently and how best to realize the next evolution of the Internet. The panelists have been asked to address what they see as the security challenges that must be addressed to ensure the continued viability of the Internet and how best to respond to those challenges.

Moderator: David Farber, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy

Panelists: Steve Crocker, CEO of Shinkuro, Inc.
Larry Roberts, Chairman of Anagran, Inc.
Paul Mockapetris, Chief Scientist and Chairman of the Board at Nominum, Inc.
Guru Parulkar, Executive Director of the Clean Slate Internet Design Program and Consulting






(*) I started my research on FP from G.Steele's student paper about parallel garbage collection.