John Markoff has a weekend story in the New York Times titled “Do We Need a New Internet?”

He provides anecdotes from influential security and Internet experts, but it comes off as a disconnected set of observations about IP addressing, security, privacy, botnet infection. Unfortunately, i’s a story with grand ambitions but without a logical thread.

From the very first sentence, the premise is problematic. He introduces us to the  Morris Internet worm (though oddly doesn’t mention it by name) which clogged the fledgling Internet in 1988.

Markoff concludes, “Since then things have gotten much, much worse.”

I was rather surprised by this. Some estimate the Morris worm affected 10% of computers then, but its impact was much greater since those machines were the hubs of timesharing and e-mail activity at coporations and college campuses in an age before laptops and cheap client computers.

I was working at the university computer labs in 1988, and since then I haven’t seen anything as massively disruptive as the Morris worm was in proportion to the user community. It had nearly every college system administrator scrambling during that time. The homogeneity of computer systems (UNIX systems running a variant of the BSD distribution) meant the worm’s job of infecting and propagating was rather simple, as it exploded out of control to jam computers and networks. Today, we have a wide variety of hardware and operating system software that has changed the nature of the risk so that an Internet-wide threat on that scale isn’t likely. Yes, on today’s Internet there are many more hosts and a wide array of threats. But characterizing today’s situation as “much, much worse,” than that massive Internet outage of the 80s is an odd claim.

One commenter in the geek ghetto of Slashdot said, the majority of the problems Markoff talks about “are almost entirely a Windows phenomenon” hooked up to always on broadband connections. Yet, Markoff doesn’t even mention this and only mentions Microsoft once in passing. More relevant would be explaining to readers how MS had been shipping insecure, dangerous Internet Explorer configurations for years out of the box by allowing ActiveX controls to be downloaded and executed off the net, no questions asked. Even in recent years, the firm’s reaction to known security holes has been sluggish (as has been the case with Markoff’s example, Conficker). One could also argue Microsoft’s new Genuine Advantage system makes things even worse by withholding system updates unless Microsoft can verify a Windows installation as a legit purchase. What this means is pirated Windows installations serve as persistent infected zombie bot-net computers. (Anyone concerned about these issues must listen to the Security Now podcast with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson. They do a great job explaining all these issues.)

When it comes to solutions to the problem Markoff has posited, it gets no better.

Consider this buzzword-heavy, information-light paragraph about a project called Clean Slate:

That has not discouraged the Stanford engineers who say they are on a mission to “reinvent the Internet.” They argue that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world. Like the existing Internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organization will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today’s network and are adopted as Internet standards.

Confused? I’ve read these lines five times over, and still don’t understand what the explanation is about. This is perhaps my general lament about the NY Times’s technology reporting. Too often, when trying to simplify their points for the layperson, they strip out so much information that it flummoxes both novices and experts.

There is a legitimate debate about the future of the Internet in terms of privacy and safety, but it is  more robust than this 1300 word story conveys. (See books like The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain.) Markoff touches on issues all along the OSI stack, from application level issues to low-level network architecture problems. But it’s not a cohesive argument for a “New Internet” per se.