One of the interesting aspects of working at Ariadne is getting to see a staggeringly wide variety of ideas and innovation. But just occasionally something comes along that makes you stop and think about some of the very bedrock technology innovation.  This happened earlier in the week when a piece hit the news wires about the Japanese government initiating a project to replace the internet with a  new technology by 2020 (some of the headlines during the week put it more sensationally “Japanese government plans to scrap internet”).

Wow, replace the internet, that sounds an ambitious project. Why would anyone want to do that? Well, there are things wrong with the internet as it is: lack of effective quality-of-service, security bolted on at various layers, power consumption of the billions of components, to name a few.  But ripping it up and starting again as the headlines imply is not the  way to go about it. Having two separate parallel networks? No thanks. Having an alternative network architecture driven out of a single government’s initiative to get an edge economically? This is counter to the whole meaning of the internet.

The internet has survived and thrived today because its underlying TCP/IP architecture has be able to embrace change. One part can be replaced or added  without effecting everything else.  At the bottom of the internet stack, faster physical transports have been developed and deployed without affecting the overall network - your dial-up modem has been no doubt now replaced by ASDL broadband and will, in future, be replaced by another faster technology such as VSDL, but it is still the same universal internet you are connected to.

At the higher levels of the stack innovation has flourished at a staggering rate. Simple application protocols such as Gopher and Veronica of the early 1990s have been superseded by http, enabling the web as we now know it. The universal addressing and transport of the internet has built entire industries, and continues to spawn more new and previously uncontemplated businesses.

This is the wonderful thing about the internet: as a universal platform it has fostered unprecedented innovation. The pace of change is set to continue with the initiatives around the semantic web and new technologies allowing for the distribution of computing around the network and hence blurring the boundary between computer and network.

The future of the internet, the platform that has been the powerhouse behind growth and innovation for the last 25 years, depends on evolving it and reinventing from within to remain the single open, universal network, not on ripping it up and starting again or building a second network.

By Fraser Harding, Ariadne's CTO in residence