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A "better Internet" is a complicated proposition

What I like about this piece by Scott Canon at KansasCity.Com is that he addresses the the real complexity of "fixing" the Internet.

“There’s no silver bullet,” said Tom Leighton, the chief scientist and co-founder of Akamai Technologies, which makes sure its clients’ Web pages remain available online even when they come under organized attack. He is also a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee. “We have to change as we go. The problems aren’t going to go away overnight.”

Neither, say some, will the system crash in an instant. “Look at the history of the planet. The sky falls very rarely,” said Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and the founder of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. “We adapt. It’s not fun. It’s expensive. It’s pretty bad out there now. But it’s not critically bad out there.

“Nobody,” he said, “is going back to pen and paper.”

In a comewhat related story, the Washington Post published a good overview of the net neutrality question and the attempt by carriers to take some of the profits that companies like Google and Yahoo are making by making them pay more to push high-bandwidth content over their networks. See my earlier post on "the broadband dance."

jon posted this at 7:21 AM
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