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Our world runs on the TCP/IP addressing protocol that basically makes the Internet possible, but TCP/IP was developed by a different world, back when the Internet was a loose federation of academic networks and there were no mobile phones or ecommerce platforms. The original architects of the internet did not develop the network for the needs we have today.

Sorry, Al Gore, we may need to reinvent the Internet.

The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor working on an alternative to the current TCP/IP-based Internet, in a recent NBC News article. "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."

Many are calling for a completely redesigned Internet, and there are several projects working on such a clean-slate approach. In the U.S. there is the National Science Foundation’s FIND project, as well as the GENI and RINA projects. Europe has FIRE, funded by Brussels. China and Japan are working on it, too.

One problem with the current Internet is that it was built on the idea of trust. Researchers largely knew one another, so they kept the shared network open and flexible — qualities that proved key to its rapid growth, but are inadequate given spammers and others with questionable morals. The Internet needs to know with certainty who sent what information.

Another problem is that the original Internet is built on the assumption that computers are in fixed locations and always connected. But with laptops, smartphones and tablets, that’s no longer the case. There’s the argument that IP addresses should be attached to people, not individual computers.

Engineers have developed workarounds, but this adds complexity and is a drag. Workarounds "can work quite well if a small fraction of the traffic is of that type," but could overwhelm computer processors and create security holes when 90 percent or more of the traffic is mobile, said Nick McKeown, co-director of Stanford's clean-slate program.

Whether a clean-slate Internet project could be implemented or whether the network is destined to live on through a Band-Aid approach is a topic of much debate.

Some think there is a looming crisis large enough that the world must reinvent the Internet, while others like the idea but see it as impractical. Even expanding the TCP/IP network addressing system to IPv6 has been slow and has caused major headaches. Redoing the whole Internet, then, would uproot too many vested interests and be even harder to implement.

“We already have so many problems with the deployment of IPv6 – the solution to the shortage of IP addresses in the original Internet – that I can’t even imagine how they could build what would not be a new Internet, but a whole new network!” said Stephane Bortzmeyer, R&D engineer at France’s domain name administration (AFNIC).

There is a middle ground, however, that being two Internets running in parallel using virtualization. Although virtualization now serves many purposes, one of its early functions was support for legacy code on a computing environment that had been fundamentally upgraded. It is entirely possible that the Internet could upgrade itself in the same way, using a clean-slate approach but supporting the very long tail of legacy systems that use the existing TCP/IP-based Internet.

Any solution is still 10-15 years off, according to experts. Time will tell which way the winds will blow, although it is fairly likely that a clean-slate approach will not work without some form of support of legacy systems. The Internet is just too big to change abruptly.