I'm pretty sure this project will grow very slowly and never grow to the importance of the Internet. The article mentions conflicting interests between companies looking to make a buck and law enforcement agencies looking read people's private communication.

I think the enormous flexibility of our current Internet happened precisely because market forces and government and marketing snoops where *not* paying attention as scientists and engineers build it the *right* way as opposed to the proprietary way or the "safe" (Safety as in the patronizing "we know what's best for you.") way.

If there really is a technical deficiency in the Internet, we will shape it so that deficiency is solved or some users will migrate a highly specialized or proprietary network.

My guess is that TCP/IP is going to rule our electronic communications for a long time yet.

Imagine not doing something about the internet mess. Imagine us having to clean the mess in 20 years.  

What mess? Spam is a pain in the butt but then, so is junk mail or junk faxes. Scientists already use the faster pipes of Internet2 (where only some people and groups can use it, keeping bandwidth usage low.) so, I fail to see where the mess really is. Even DNS seems to work pretty well despite repeated stories of impending doom.

I'd say the only real failure in the last ten years is the failure to widely adopt digital signatures and default encryption of e-mail. That's really it.

Internet2 already addresses the speed issues and was already started a few years ago. These guys have a solution in search of a problem.