Corps didn't build the internet though. The internet was built by the US Military. Corps have expanded it, but at the same time they have also severely restricted and limited it. Example the recent charges in New York against Verizon as well as the hostile stance against net neutrality. The fact that an effectively unlimited resource is being metered and yet they still try to sell it as "unlimited".
If those same interests would reduce their profit margins and instead invest it into upgrading their infrastructure to provide first class service, I might be inclined to agree with you. But that's not what's happened and as these giants coalesce and consolidate, it provides ever fewer options. It's the ISPs and it's the backbone providers.
Look for instance at SCTP, the protocol has been around for 15 years now, and yet there are still major providers that don't speak it. IPv6 is only now starting to get some traction, but the largest ISPs do not support it.
Every dollar they don't have to spend on upgrades, is a dollar that goes to profit instead. As these networks begin to decay and age out it causes fragility. Perhaps more importantly, if ISPs were as easy to replace as end devices, we would likely see Moore's Law style increases in bandwidth to the end user. But that's not what we see. Instead we see caps, limits and throttling all in the name of "congestion control".
ARPA net,
The internet as we know it more or less evolved from there. It still evolving as you noted. It was financed and built by thousands of independent businesses. Feel free to get involved.
And to continue that...
yup.. that's why I posted the link...and private industry took it and RUN. I'm loving it.
Ok, but taking it back to my point.
The current design has significant choke points. The incentive to losen those checkpoints isn't there and at best in terms of bandwidth, we're seeing incremental increases vs the exponential increases we see in every other field of computing.
We know that the technology exists to lift these limits and we know that there are some providers who still have routers, switches and gateways running that were built in the pre 9/11 days.
So my proposal. Treat this as damage and route around it, by taking the same concepts we've learned from our experience building digital economies and use it to solve the problem.
Example, imagine if instead of everyone in a crowded room contending for the same wifi bandwidth, that each cellphone, tablet, laptop etc, were able to negotiate to share portions of their bandwidth.
Furthermore instead of a highly insecure "internet of things" turning into a monster botnet swarm, what if that were flipped on it's head and each device became a router, smart enough to help each packet a little further on to it's final destination?
GOOD IDEA. Do it.
I read about a guy in Italy (just looked, can't find it) who proposed building a highly redundant, massively parallel, widely distributed network..for CHEAP. it had to do with 'shared resources' and 'distributed wi-fi'...and 'white space'.
The gist of the idea was that someone could buy a device...and it would connect to other similar devices (within oh...about a mile radius) by wi-fi. As more and more people bought and set up their devices the network would spread, organically. First local, then nationwide, and eventually the whole world would be covered by the net. Data Packets would thus be 'routed' among the WIDELY distributed network, none of which was to be dominated by any one company or group. If a hole in the net appeared, it was routed around.
Sounds like a good idea to me.