Hello everybody,
do you think a certain aspect of the core internet technology is broken? Do you have an idea what could be done about it? This is the time to submit your idea to:
Best Regards, Matthias
PS: Below some more information by Michiel:
* Michiel Leenaars [2017-07-24 08:07 +0200]:
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please find some information about the consultation for the European Next Generation Internet initiative to pass on to your members. To clarify: we are looking for the 'technical debt' (or put differently, 'skeletons in the closet') of the internet, i.e. what is preventing the internet as a whole from moving forward. And what could be done about it, given that the EC is embarking on a Next Generation Internet initiative and we can try to direct public funding to it. While there is plenty of innovative work happening at the fringes, the core internet technology that is actually being run at internet scale is not actually properly absorbing that work - in a sense creating even more chaos than if nothing would have happened. We are looking for intervention logic to get things going again.
The context is the following:
NLnet foundation (the independent charity I work, which was was set up by pioneers of the European internet) and Gartner were invited by the European Commision to write the vision for their Next Generation Internet initiative, as well as prioritise the key topics for funding.
We are organising the process in a much broader way than previous 'next-gen internet' efforts (of which there were quite a few), as we believe these were doomed to fail from the start because they only pushed for 'innovation' and never involved the right people (= the people that actually design and operate the 'current' internet). Not to mention that you need people from adjacent areas (such as operating systems and browsers) to be involved. Note that many of the people and organisations we think could make the most difference tend to avoid the public funding machinery, because they have their own funding and little need for bureaucracy and forced consortia. However, this leaves many issues unresolved, and we want to change that. (we are also eager to see the unfortunate bureaucracy and forced consortia go away, and likely that will happen too in the context of the NGI initiative - which is really awesome).
We actually went to get support from all the leading European umbrella organisations - besides FSFE we approached RIPE (the European regional internet registry), CENTR (organisation of domain registries), GEANT (research networks), ISP associations, the digital civil rights community (EDRi) and Internet Society, etc. So not just the separate communities that operate different layers of the technology but also what we consider 'ethical guardians' of the internet. And we are not looking to just get their presidents, managing directors or CTO's involved, but also harvest 'bottom up' - under water the iceberg looks rather different, and there are quite some issues that are not in view at the management level. We are therefore very thankful for you relaying this information to your members.
You can either send you ideas (in any shape or form, although written can concise is preferred) by mail to us (ngi@nlnet.nl), or fill out the open online consultation at:
(that is conceptually like an issue tracker, and helps us to isolate the individual actions - we believe by now that no single issue by itself is responsible, the ossification of the internet is more 'death by a thousand cuts').
We feel this is quite a unique opportunity for the internet to get funding to resolve a significant amount of technical debt that has accrued over the years, as well as stimulate new interesting work to hardening the internet and make it more resilient and keep it open - an area I expect your members to be quite interested in.
I hope your membership has time to provide us with some input, and/or relay this to some interesting people (we are open to any suggestions). I have some additional information attached, if people have any questions do not hesitate to let us know - me and my colleagues are happy to help.
Best, Michiel Leenaars
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