Lords considered rewriting internet

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 15 Aug 2007 at 10:04

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee seriously contemplated redesigning the entire internet as part of their inquiry into online security.

The revelation comes part-way through the 121-page report, which damned the internet as 'a Wild West' operating outside of the law.

"The problems that derive from the fundamental design of the internet are profound," the report claims. "While the internet supports astonishing innovation and commerical growth, it is almost impossible to control or monitor that traffic that uses it... So we have to ask the question, whether it is possible to redesign the internet more securely?"

The answer from industry experts was, unsurprisingly, a resounding no. Professor Mark Handley from UCL's Computer Science department told the Lords: "The idea of coming up with something different without getting there incrementally from where we are is simply not going to happen."

When probed on whether it was possible to graft an "identity layer" on to the internet, James Blessing of the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) replied: "The simple answer is that it would be incredibly difficult to rectify the problem because you are talking about rewriting, on a global scale, the entire internet." Which is almost certainly beyond the remit of the Lords.

The Lords finally appear to have seen sense by the time they came to making their recommendations. "We see no prospect of a fundamental redesign of the internet in the foreseeable future," they conclude. However, they do recommend "research into alternative network architectures".