A couple months ago, I wrote about Stanford’s Clean Slate initiative to look at how the internet should be redesigned, if we started all over again.
Saturday’s Globe and Mail had a story by Christopher Dreher that followed up on the initiative. Untangling the World Wide Web dares to put forward what it acknowledges is a heretical question:
Should we throw out the Web and start over?
Why do we need to revisit the current architecture of the internet? Among other reasons, the public internet has too many variables, including security issues and blips in connectivity. According to Nick McKeown, the project leader of Clean Slate:
If air-traffic control were run over the public Internet, then I wouldn’t fly.
Repeating my question from last March: Who will lead Canada’s participation in examining a clean slate for the internet?
With the federal government’s new science and technology initiative announced last week, perhaps Canada can focus some attention on this kind of important fundamental research.