Is the Internet broken?
That’s the question asked by Douglas McIntyre over at the site 24/7 Wall Street. While I don’t think the Internet is broken, it is certainly suffering from some outdated infrastructure and ways of doing things. After all, we are still using approaches developed 20 or even 40 years ago. It amazes me how well those old approaches have held up in a world where billions of people are sending untold volumes of data over the Internet every day. But the strains are showing. As McIntyre writes:
The Internet as the public has known it and used it for the last decade may not be the Internet for the future. The system is getting old and rickety, particularly for the volume of commerce it has to accommodate. The prophylactic software that was meant to protect the web is less effective. Like anything else the is used regularly whether it is a car, a light bulb, or a PC, the Internet is going to have to be patched and upgraded more often now. It won’t work every hour of every day anymore.
In addition to problems like security, reliability, and limits on capacity, the Internet is running out of addresses. Ars Technica notes that next year may be when the present system (called IPv4) hits its limits of about 4 billion addresses. A new system called IPv6 is waiting in the wings but little of the Internet will be able to use it any time soon. Ars Technica notes:
Either by choice or otherwise, the big ISPs will soon have to stop giving each customer an IPv4 address of his or her own. Giving those customers just IPv6 is not an option, as the majority of the services are still IPv4-only and many IP-capable devices that don’t run a full operating system (smartphones, VoIP phones, webcams) don’t support IPv6. So that means stretching the existing IPv4 addresses in some way through “carrier grade NAT” (CGN).
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