Japanese Researchers Aim to Replace the Internet

Gary writes "Japanese communications minister Yoshihide Suga said Friday that Japan will start research and development on technology for a new generation of network that would replace the Internet, eyeing bringing the technology into commercial use in 2020. The envisaged network is expected to ensure faster and more reliable data transmission, and have more resilience against computer virus attacks and breakdowns."

Doesn't this already exist?

Doesn't this already exist [internet2.edu]? I mean, seriously, how many parallel projects do we need to do the same thing?

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

Agreed. This is totally redundant, and there's no reason to do it - just like other companies writing operating systems when Windows Vista was being developed.

Wait, bad example...

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

My fear is that it's a perfect example. By 2020, the current internet will have a level of lock-in that makes Windows look disposable. "Faster" and "safer" will have a tough time overcoming "empty".

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

By 2020, the current internet will have a level of lock-in that makes Windows look disposable.

You're going to have to explain that one a little, I'm afraid. "Lock in" doesn't just mean "used by a lot of people". The term, "vendor lock in" to use the full term, is where a single company controls a protocol and abuses that control to force price hikes, unnecessary upgrades and arbitrary restrictions upon its customers.

But I don't think TCP/IP (the protocol that underlies the Internet) is owned by anyone as such, so it's not like we're going to get forced to pay more for a protocol "upgrade". Nor could some hypothetical owner force us all to use any such upgrade - so there's no fear there.

As for arbitrary restrictions, the Internet already lets you run any protocol you can devise over TCP/IP without the need for permission or approval. That may change if the anti-net-neutrality crowd start a program of aggressive traffic shaping, but that's hardly likely to be improved by a new proprietary Internet; more likely we'll see DRM on every hop, and no new usages permitted without a five year committee process.

So, to summarise: please explain how can we have any meaningful lock in on the internet, and (assuming this to be possible), please also explain how this would be bad.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

please explain how can we have any meaningful lock in on the internet, and (assuming this to be possible), please also explain how this would be bad.

i think the parent post is referring vendor lock-in, specifically provider lock in.

if you have no real choice in who provides your internet access you have take what they give you or choose to live without internet access. with all of the shenanigans (filtering, capping, throttling, etc.) that american telcos and cablecos have threatened to pull (or are actively pulling) thanks to the lack of competition in the residential broadband market, perhaps a non-american competitor to the internet as most americans know it is just what the doctor ordered.

with that said, if they really wanted to impress me they would make such a network accessible from the US.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

The internet is built over a series of seven layers - the . [wikipedia.org]

The idea of splitting everything into layers is so that any one system could be changed without having to totally rewrite everything else - if you want to replace your dial-up modem with a wi-fi card, all you have to do is replace the drivers. If your ISP wants to replace their router network with an ATM network that's easily done without affecting you. If someone came along with a better router management protocol, that's easily done.

The original Internet did have redundancy and resistance against breakdown built in. Unfortunately, many network companies found it cheaper simply to route separate logical networks along one connection, rather than have multiple and completely separate connections. Thus, we end up with a hard-wired minimum spanning tree network, that fails as soon as one link goes down.

Let them go ahead with this idea, but by the time they complete their literature survey, they will probably find out there is very little that they need to change.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

I know this is /. but did you read the article you linked?

Noting actually uses the OSI model it's just an abstraction to help people understand how networking works. The Internet uses the TCP/IP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP_model [wikipedia.org] model of Application, Transport, Network, and Data link layers.

PS: The internet has redundancy as a mesh of networks even if many of those networks have single point's of failure. On second as you speak with such conviction on subjects you know little about you might belong on /. Welcome to the party.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

The Internet 2 is a consortium maintains a high-speed backbone across the US; the costs are subsidized by the government so universities can communicate each other at 10Gbps rates without having to go out to the commercial Internet. A small portion of the funding goes to some middleware projects.

However, most NSF-funded networking projects use the I2 as their testbed, but they're not necessarily a part of the I2. For example, GENI - the US effort to redesign internet protocols from the ground up - will run in parallel with I2. GENI is the US counterpart to this Japanese effort (although it's hard to tell from the light-on-details article).

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

Unless they figure out how to ensure redundancy, they will have reinvented the wheel. The reason the Internet is unreliable is that the last two nodes on the graph have only one connection. Why do we have only one ISP, and why do ISPs only have one upstream provider? Economics. Let's see them solve that one.

Furthermore, we've been about to implement IPv6 for years now.

Even furthermore, their ultra-secure shiny modern internetwork will still have to connect to the kludgy 1980's rustbucket the rest of us use on our Windows-based computers, which means it will be pwned in a few minutes just like the original.

It's the Silver Bullet Syndrome. They think they'll invent a secure network, when all they'll be doing is achieving a bit of obsecurity.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

Yep. The only question is - do you want the network to function like The Matrix, or be more along the lines of Ghost in the Shell?

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

Internet 2.0 and Web 2.0 are different things.

Internet 2.0 - New infrastructure for the net.
Web 2.0 - My web site is shit, filled with AJAX and contains no content.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

What you need to understand is the Japanese culture. They always start kind of "world domination" plans. Where is the 5gen computer? Forget it. Japanese are good in making plans, plans that are absolutely tough and a bit over the top.

Like what, starting a naval war with the United States?

Yes, but Ask Slashdot: how much will it cost?

I am glad they are going to replace the Internet, but I wish there was some sort of forum, some sort of blog, where we could discuss how much it would cost to replace the Internet.
Maybe I should submit an Ask Slashdot question. I also have a time machine. 2+2=?

Re:Yes, but Ask Slashdot: how much will it cost?

erm?

Ok, I admit that networking isn't my strongest suit. But... am I missing something? What do you mean "the fact that the internet cannot cope with anything other than ascii"? The internet is just a protocol for routing information from point A to point B. That information is stored in bytes. By all means correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is anything language-specific about those bytes.

Are you confusing "the internet" with "the web"? Web pages do assume (by default at least) an ascii encoding, I believe. But that's not something that needs to be solved by changing the internet, that's something you could fix just by modifying browsers. Which, surprise surprise, is something people have already done. Heck, for that matter, what's up with your original premise, that they want to "have things in a language that they can understand, using characters that appear on their keyboards"? Most Japanese web sites ARE in japanese... Most web browsers DO support unicode encoding...

Are you possibly just talking about the URLs themselves? They don't have unicode support I guess, although that's something that could [I think?] be handled just by supplying a unicode-enabled custom DNS?

Don't get me wrong, research is generally a good thing overall, and as you point out, who knows what useful things they'll come up with along the way. But most of your reasons for why reinventing the internet might be a good idea, ring hollow to me. That, and the tone of your post feels like you have a specific bone to pick with either one of the previous posters, or possibly just with america in general?

Personally, my main concern with a "new" internet is the climate in which it would be born. The current internet had the benefit of being created for non-comercial use in mind, and was deliberately designed with open access in mind. It's structure is deliberately set up in a fairly idealistic way. It has a crazy-low barrier for entry if you want to put something on it. I find it fairly unlikely that a "new" internet would be as open. Corporations in Japan (or America, for that matter) are unlikely to make that mistake again, and given the current environment (again, in both japan AND america) I find it exceedingly unlikely that any new creation on that scale wouldn't be at least partially beholden to corporate interests.

(And yes, I know, our current internet's high-ideal design is steadily eroding before the face of a never-ending series of attempted power grabs by various groups. But at least it's.... taking them longer? At least such attempts are bandaids on an unfriendly design, as opposed to having the whole thing designed to be friendly to corporate control from the get-go?)

Re:Yes, but Ask Slashdot: how much will it cost?

The 'http://' and '.cn' are not Chinese characters - they are ASCII. I'm not sure how a DNS server in, say, Iceland would cope with receiving URLs written purely in Chinese, Russian, Korean and Arabic. The easy answer is that the current specification requires 'http://' and '.cn' to be written in ASCII. But to many around the world, those characters are as meaningless to them as the Chinese characters are to me. That is why there is still room for the system to be improved so that any language can be used without recourse to ASCII. Doesn't the fact that Slashdot won't even accept the URL underline this point?

hmm

In normal cases when you see news like this I would be tempted to say that this is something that will never materalize, but Japan have a trackrecord of going their own way with for example mobilephone networks. WIll be interesting to watch if they getting anywhere with this.

Japanese porn!

I guess the next wave of the internet will be based around much freakier porn than today's internet.

Cluster?

Wasn't there already a story on the next generation "series of tubes" a few weeks ago? It's supposedly supposed to be run on thousands of distributed networks and run on fiber and weld and create life and bring world peace.

Who's gonna pay for that?

The thing i snobody wants to pay for it. Compare this to the AOL and CompuServe networks that were available for a long time. Competing with the free internet. They don't exist anymore. Just because anybody who owns it can put restrictions on you. It's not gonna work.

Re:Who's gonna pay for that?

You are completely ignoring what everyone is thinking.

how much DRM are they gonna shovel onto this thing? The current Internet setup is near perfect because of it's flaws. It is why it took off like a bat out of hell. "fix it" like these researchers and corperations want it and it will be Cable TV. Bland and icky.

They want to shove so much DRM into the internet as well as have all your packets signed by your information, etc...

I have a suggestion for the researchers, give up now, it will be a failure. good god look at how long ipV6 has been around and it is still being ignored. I think I read my 100th article about how we are running out of IP addresses that was worded identically to the one I read in 1999.

New Japanese internet

I bet this is going to be the same as the old one, except that all the addresses will comply to the following syntax: pika.youraddresshere.chu

I remember the last time

I remember the last time the Japanese announced that they were going to change the whole face of computing, with this [wikipedia.org] project. After a few years, it was going to be the only hardware/operating system/networking combination that anyone would ever use. I wonder how they're getting on?

Sure, you all laugh at the Japanese

Once upon a time, France had complete domination of network information communication thingies [wikipedia.org].

France probably laughed too, a big gutteral Gaulic laugh: "Silly Americains, think you can replace the Minitel? I fart in your general direction!"

Replace it with what?

Whatever they replace it with has got to be a) self-aware b) housed in a really cool-looking robotic body c) flail phallic, cybernetic tentacles on command and d) be preoccupied with conquering neighboring nations and cowering schoolgirls. I predict it will be called EcchiNet. Nuclear war and terminator endoskeletons to come later.

Japanese version?

The american internet is made of a series of tubes, right? Well, then we can guess that the Japanese version will be a series of tentacles.

silly

Seriously... it's like Beta coming to the party with VHS, only a few decades too late instead of a few years.

Also, what's wrong with gradual improvement? For the most part, the Internet works doesn't it? Why not just fix the loose nuts. I'll agree though that some kind of pay-per-email system would be better then the 100% free system we've got now... though black listing bad ISP's and webmail accounts is getting better, but it is still not perfect.

Costs

Great. We can ask them how much it's going to cost [slashdot.org]

Lain

Anyone seen serial experiments lain? I think the Japanese are the last people we want inventing any internet....bazaar, to say the least, but strangely gripping, in a cultish kind of way.

Good music though.

Nice response time!

Damn, that response time was faster than a freaked out web browser company resolving a security hole!

Just days after we heard Internet TV would crash it [slashdot.org] they're working on a fix. And they're working on an Internet, not just a security hole. :-o

A new internet with DRM and government spying.....

I don't even trust this old and busted internet. The new internet would be nothing but pandering to government 'security' concerns and big business DRM demands.

Count me out.

Simple question(s)

1. Will it be backwards compatible with the existing internet?
------------- (If "no" for #1 above, it must be a Microsoft product!)

2. This kind of claim sounds like a marketing campaign, is this a marketing effort?
------------- (If "yes" for #2 above, it must be a Microsoft product!)

NSF is already doing this

http://www.nsf.gov/cise/cns/geni/ [nsf.gov]

"With support from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), researchers are working together to design a bold new research platform called GENI, the Global Environment for Network Innovations. As envisioned, GENI will allow researchers throughout the country to build and experiment with completely new and different designs and capabilities that will inform the creation of a 21st Century Internet."

Not likely to work

The problem that all these people who want to replace things like e-mail or the Internet run in to is the whole thing that makes these technologies great is interoperability. The great thing about the Internet is that you hook in to it anywhere and barring your ISP or government having blocks up, you can talk to everything. You can switch ISPs, areas of the world, devices, etc it all doesn't matter. It's not like we didn't have networks before the Internet, what we didn't have was a network that everyone and everything could work on.

So if you are going to replace it, you have to do it with something that works with the Internet. I am not going to sign on to a new network, no matter how good you say your technology is, if I can't access what's already out there. Of course a big part of what people want to do when creating a new standard is to cut off the problems that the old standard had, and thus it becomes incompatible and thus isn't workable.

I mean the problem with a new e-mail system isn't designing one that's resistant to spam. That's easy. The problem is designing one that is resistant to spam but not incompatible with existing, unsecure, e-mail. You aren't going to get people to switch otherwise. It doesn't do me any good to have a spam proof technology if all the people who need to contact me don't also use that.

Same deal with the Internet at large. I don't care how cool your new network is, if it doesn't provide me with access to everything on the Internet, and give everyone on the Internet access to servers I run, then it really isn't very useful to me.

Really, the Internet, for all its flaws, is here to stay for a long time I think. It's not that we couldn't do better, it's that we aren't willing to redo everything from the ground up and switch over. Same shit with plenty of other things. With modern technology, a HVDC power grid might be a better system than what we have. However that's not what we have, and we aren't going to replace what we do have entirely, so we keep adding to the existing system. The Internet is much harder given that you are talking about a network that spans the whole world (and that you actually can convert AC to DC and back).

It's a nice thought that "Hey, let's just tear down all this crap and rebuild it right, based on the better knowledge we have now," but it usually isn't at all practical in reality.

IP6 implemented by then?

Do you think IP6 will be implemented by then?

Problem

Can they make it Godzilla-proof?

On a similar note...

Oh great. As if I am that happy with sony's overly complexified television sets which are difficult to service, their over priced ps3 with no neat games, and their vaio line of laptops with non-existant support and proprietary hardware that linux won't work on.

Imagine a next generation internet designed by ....sony.

Why can't japan just go send out a team to air condition hell instead and leave the internet alone?

Gore approval?

Has anyone checked with Al Gore about replacing the internet he benevolently invented for us?
-S

Replace the Internet

Good Luck with that.

-Hackus

What's in and out?

I hope they would think about the children and peer connections will be not possible. All we need is a solid corporate content provider to user lines.

Seriously though :( ... why not just switch to IPv6 finally?

I remember when MicroSoft was going to do this

Originally MicroSoft was going to grow MSN as its "private internet" and conquer the Net with proprietary protocols, much like it did in operating systems, office software, and browsers(afterwards). MicroSoft proposed "extensions" to TC/IP or replacing it altogther and losts of people were upset. The Bill had his famous "Damascus" episode where he turned MicroSoft 180-degrees into embracing the then InterNet.

Better network speed aaaand,

better control of what people sees of course !

theres always this main motive behind 'new internet' crap.

Japan already has a much newer internet

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/earthquake_se ts_japan_back_to_2147 [theonion.com]

It's just that an earthquake set them back over a few hundred years.

At least partially politically-inspired

I'd have to say that at least partially, this might be politically inspired. With the trends towards anti-piracy in the US, I really doubt that people outside the US are thrilled with the notion that the US government can effectively snoop on anything that passes through our networks. By the time Japan can build their own network, the majority of people are probably going to be using data lines for their voice, too...and replacing all of that with one that they can defend from outside spying is probably going to become very enticing to many countries. Unless, of course, the US government wakes the hell up and cuts this fascist crap out. Nationalization of the internet is going to really hurt international free trade.

Don't overlook the word "commercial"

Something I thought would have received more attention here is the following: "...bringing the technology into commercial use in 2020." (Emphasis added.) To me, this is the cautionary part of the story. And over the past 60 years, the Japanese have proved themselves as adept as Americans or Europeans at earning a buck (or Euro, or 1M Yen).

The basic error is...

...that quite a few people don't get the fact that the very same things that make the Internet a pest are the things that make it what it is. The Internet is a relict, based on very simple, public protocols that allow almost everything, good and bad. The good old Internet assumes almost nothing and allows nearly everything. Replace it with something that assumes a lot and allows only very limited things and you get TV with DRM. What is exactly what some people want it to be, but *we* don't want that, do we?

There's nothing wrong with the Internet. There's something wrong with some governments, corporations and, generally, systems, but changing the Internet won't change a bit of *that*.

When someone has new protocols, business models or whatever, fine. Show them, use them, and when they're good, they'll thrive. If not, not.

JISX

I'm having a hard time getting excited about a new internet designed by the same people that brought us the JISX encoding nightmare.

but...

...is it compatible with web 1.0?

Regrow the Monopoly

The Japanese telecommunications industry has been unhappy with the internet since it had to open it to general public access in 1995 or face serious economic reprisals from its trading partners. Prior to 1995, NTT was busy trying to construct a monopoly that would lock international ISPs out of Japan and allow the Japanese Telcom giant (still a de facto monopoly) to charge enormous user fees. Creating an alternative that they completely own would allow the government and NTT to once again assert control over the system and claim the monetary riches they feel they lost when they had to throw open the internet to genuine domestic competition from local and international providers.

But how long until we can say

MEGAMAN! JACK IN!

2chan 2

Does this mean there will be an uber version of 2chan? (Pretty much synonymous with Internet in Japan...)

I predict it'll be like DoCoMo - ridiculously high speed and advanced, and pretty much only supported in Japan until eons later when it trickles out to the rest of us. Oh well, no RIAA, just lax Japanese censorship guidelines!

"I for one welcome our futuristic overlords."

The medium is NOT the message!

It doesn't matter if its carried on wet string, copper pair cable or wireless broadband. It doesn't matter if it uses Morse Code, ASCII Code, TCP/IP or IP2. What makes the Internet is that it is an INTERnational NETwork, not the medium or protocol that carries it. Sheesh, would somebody please show Mr Mcluan the bloody door? Replace the internet, PHOOEY!

Re:That's good and all, but...

Yes, but unfortunately, because it's Japanese, all genitalia will be censored with mosaic pixelations. :(