A new way to look at networking by Van Jacobson
Originally found on Bret Victor's What can a technologist do about climate change? (November 2015)
This presentation provides a nice overview of the context when TCP/IP was invented and what is the solution to replace it.
One aspect Van Jacobson often insists on is that you need to have the right point of view, you need to know what is the problem if you want to be able to solve it. In my opinion, it's a sign of a great problem solver.
TCP/IP was invented at a time where there wasn't a lot of data nor a lot of machines. It was mostly of lot of users per machine.
But now the world is different. There are a lot of machines per user (phone, personal computer, work computer, etc.). TCP/IP was extremely good for the problem it solved at the time but it was was not invented for the current world.
TCP/IP was built for a conversation model between two entities (e.g Phone A <-> Phone B). But the internet doesn't do communication. More than 99% of the traffic is point to multi-points (e.g multiple users ask for one URL and get the data). What we need now is a dissemination model, not a communication model anymore.
One of the thing that annoys Van Jacobson the most is that Internet is a binary thing: you are connected or you are not, you have information or you don't, there is no middle ground.
The design philosophy of the new technology to replace TCP/IP:
His new protocol can be found on Named Data Networking.