[Reprint] Content Is King: Can Researchers Design an Information-Centric Internet?
Changing the Internet's focus from data location to the nature of the information itself should improve network efficiency and security
By Larry Greenemeier
In 2009 singer Susan Boyle's extremely popular YouTube video of the Les Miserables song "I Dreamed a Dream" racked up 140 million hits in just four days, the equivalent of a digital tsunami that blasted the Internet with gale-force winds. Given that the Internet was created more than four decades ago primarily as a communications network, few content providers other than Google could have successfully managed the storm of requests coming in for access to that video without crashing.
The Internet was designed for "computers to make phone calls to other computers, and that's a really inefficient way of distributing content," Van Jacobson, a former research fellow at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), said in a 2011 video interview on the company’s Web site. YouTube successfully handled the inundation of requests for Boyle's video "because they're a big, distributed content...