‘Declaration’ Seeks Overall Internet Redesign
More than 60 research groups funded by the European Commission have signed the Declaration of Bled asserting an urgent need to redesign the Internet. “We cannot wait,” Joao da Silva, Director of the Directorate Converged Networks and Services, said at a conference on the future of the Internet. “We have to act a lot faster.” Since EU countries allocated 9.1 billion Euro for ICT research under the i2010 initiative and the EC and industry already have spent over 400 million Euro and will spend more than 2 billion Euro over the next two years, “we expect results from you,” he said.
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The effort comes as clean slate work funded by the National Science Foundation is sifting the first round of proposals on how a future, post-IP network could look. The Japanese project Akari, funded by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, published a first conceptual paper. Cooperation between GENI and European research labs is “under exploration,” said Heidi Dempsey, Office Operations and Integration Manager of the NSF GENI Project. “How this can work in practice has to be worked out.”
The Bled Declaration aims to boost cooperation among more than 80 research projects. A new “Future Internet Assembly” (FIA) will improve connections among the projects. This raises key questions, some said. “Is there a need for the new architecture?” said Petri Mahonen, coordinator of the EIFFEL project at RWTH Aachen University. “Do we really need a new IP? And are we even able to make it?”
No one expects a fast, clean break. “It would be nonsensical,” said da Silva. “Some communities are seeking to fragment [the Internet] into islands which will create barriers to the free flow of knowledge online,” Commissioner Viviane Reding said.
A core topic for the declaration is solving the privacy riddle, speakers said. The privacy problem also has to be tackled in any new architecture approach, they said.