Communication Networks Economy

Appendix 12The Internet’s Flaws (Vint Cerf)

The Internet remains an unfinished and evolving work. We are reminded daily of opportunities for improvement. Recent revelations concerning surveillance of Internet traffic suggest that we should take a number of steps to protect user privacy and confidentiality. The regular use of end-to-end cryptography at multiple layers in the protocol architecture seems an obvious improvement.

Recently, reports have surfaced of so-called “buffer-float” problems caused by the improper sizing of buffers at firewalls or routers that lie at a discontinuity in local and Internet access bandwidth. This creates an increasing delay and misinterpretation of resulting measured round-trip time [CER 14].