The Net’s basic flaws cost firms billions, impede innovation, and threaten national security. It’s time for a clean-slate approach, says MIT’s David D. Clark.

This is Part 1 of a three part series. Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.

In his office within the gleaming-stainless-steel and orange-brick jumble of MIT’s Stata Center, Internet elder statesman and onetime chief protocol architect David D. Clark prints out an old PowerPoint talk. Dated July 1992, it ranges over technical issues like domain naming and scalability. But in one slide, Clark points to the Internet’s dark side: its lack of built-in security.

In others, he observes that sometimes the worst disasters are caused not by sudden events but by slow, incremental processes - and that humans are good at ignoring problems. “Things get worse slowly. People adjust,” Clark noted in his presentation. “The problem is assigning the correct degree of fear to distant elephants.”

[Continue reading The Internet Is Broken Part 1]

[Continue reading The Internet Is Broken Part 2]

[Continue reading The Internet Is Broken Part 3]

Tags: internet, security, mit, david d. clark, vinton cerf, vint cerf, broken, shortcoming