Weblogsky: Internet Zero

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Internet Zero

Originally posted at WorldChanging: Another World Is Here:

Frank Coluccio posted about an article in the October Scientific American about Internet Zero of Internet-0, "described as an architecture that defines the protocols and internetworking relationships of everyday objects found in the home and the business place." The Scientific American article isn't online yet, but Frank posts from a sidebar summary of the project:

Giving everyday objects the ability to connect to a data network would have a range of benefits: making it easier for homeowners to configure their lights and switches, reducing the cost of complexity of building construction, assisting with home health care. Many alternative standards currently compete to do just that – a situation reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, when computers and networks came in multiple incompatibly types.
To eliminate this technological Tower of Babel, the data protocol that is at the heart of the Internet can be adopted to represent information in whatever form it takes: pulsed eclectically, flashed optically, clicked acoustically, broadcast electromagnetically or printed mechanically.
Using this Internet-0 encoding, the original idea of linking computer networks into a seamless whole – the Inter� in "Internet" can be extended to networks of all types of devices, a concept know as interdevice internetworking.

and he places special emphasis on a final point

The seventh and final attribute of I0 is the use of open standards. The desirability of open standards should not need saying, but it does. Many of the competing standards for connecting devices are proprietary. The recurring lesson of the computer industry has been that proprietary businesses should be built on top of, rather than in conflict with, open standards.�

That last piece resonates with discussions about the importance of the end-to-end argument or the dumb network paradigm, the advantages of which are clear engineers who have special intelligence about such things, but less so to companies and politicians who are tempted to build what amount to proprietary or regulatory constraints into network systems, rather than place the intelligence at the edges. As networks grow and evolve and we add more devices (as with Internet Zero), it's important to be explicit and forceful about the requirement to deep it open and "dumb."

jon posted this at 9:34 AM
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