Good Riddance

The internet was originally designed to have an address for everything that was connected to it - if you ask a remote server for something, it sends the response back to your address; if you want to make something available, you advertise your address, and so on. But that didn't scale very well, so a whole host of protocols and programs have sprung up for sharing one public address between maybe dozens of computers, and handling the connections going in and out. This is fiddly, and it could get even worse - the pessimists predict that instead of IPv6, we'll end up with ISPs sharing IP adresses between multiple broadband connections, using yet more NAT. Not only will your Skype client be asking your router for a "pinhole" for incoming data, your router will have to ask your ISP for a pinhole through to the "real" internet.

Firewall on a Chip

So, giving everything an IPv6 address will make everything easier, right?

Well... it turns out, the very things that make NAT a nuisance have a rather handy side-effect: ne'er-do-wells can't send random data to your laptop trying to hack in and steal that text file you store all your passwords in. Your router has to look at packets to determine which computer they're for anyway, so it ends up acting like a simple firewall without really trying. And when we connect to a trusted network, we expect it to provide this basic insulation from the wider internet.

Wi-fi has already made this assumption out of date - devices like smartphones, netbooks, and tablets are more or less designed to connect to untrusted networks; even if you never use public hotspots, you don't know how well the office network you've just borrowed the WPA key for is secured. So this is probably a good time to stop trusting routers to protect us.

The alternative is that every computer runs a "personal firewall" - a program that checks all traffic on the machine, both inbound and outbound. At the moment, this means an application you install, which clogs up your CPU and memory, slowing down your machine. So maybe the next generation of devices won't just have a simple network controller, they'll have a fully flexible Network Processing Unit (NPU) - a firewall on a chip, with its own memory, perhaps a bit of solid state storage for accumulated rules, and so on. The CPU won't be taken up with traffic analysis; the OS authors won't have to implement an entire firewall, just drivers for communicating with the NPU; and yet you'll be carrying your own firewall whatever network you connect to.

Splinternet

Now if every device (eventually) has an NPU, what other assumptions can we challenge? First up is that other hallmark of the "trusted" network, the notion of "local" resources. In future, rather than relying on topology ("it's on the same router therefore it's local") trust decisions will have to be made explicitly - the VPN will be more important than the LAN. If you bring your laptop to a meeting, you'll only be granted access to the internet, and maybe to send jobs to a nearby printer; but you'll still have access to your shared server back at HQ (if it's not all "in the cloud" anyway). The devices in question will each have some authentication that knows whether you should be allowed in or not.

The key thing about this is that it is de-centralized - devices would be able to talk to each other in all sorts of ways, using central servers only as brokers for authentication. Devices could share - or even trade - spare resources such as bandwidth, or even CPU. A laptop in a neighbouring room might be able to access a wi-fi hotspot that's out of your range, or be physically closer to a file server than you. (Just make sure you're encrypting all your traffic - another job for the NPU perhaps?)

HTTP over BitTorrent

Now at this point anyone who actually knows how all this works will no doubt be champing at the bit to tell me why everything I've written is outrageous nonsense (and everyone else will have got bored and stopped reading), so I'll just mention one last crazy idea.

Connecting your smartphone to your next-door neighbour's laptop is all very well, but it's hardly going to be a fast connection is it? On the other hand, what if you're both trying to access the same content - wouldn't it be great if you could somehow access each other's cached data?

Obviously you've got to know that the data is kosher, but imagine an HTTP/2.0 response of "333 Use This P2P Hash", or handing your browser a .torrent file. This wouldn't have to be limited to huge files, either - the common resources of a website (JS, CSS, "chrome" images, etc) could be bundled up into one torrent, like the episodes of a series, for you to grab and extract what you need.

Maybe all this is a bit far-fetched, but unless people start working on this next generation of "super-distributed internet" soon, we're going to be stuck in the "IPv6 is more pain than gain" loop for some time to come...

Glossing over the slight contradiction that TV over the Internet is, necessarily, digital, and the equally all-encompassing vagueness of "internet-based", it seems to me that far from being the future of TV, digital broadcasting is just an interesting stepping stone, and by the time we get to switchover, the Next Big Thing will already be here. Digital radio, meanwhile, has so little benefit over FM that I've never really seen the point (interestingly, the Grauniad agrees with me on that one, too) and is heading to the internet already - think Spotify and last.fm.

At the time, there was a lot of hype over Joost, but when I tried it, it was appalling - pop-up adverts in the middle of your TV screen anyone? The currently US-only Hulu seems to be more respected, but I think something more fundamental has yet to happen, and that is the emergence of a technology, not a service. Ideally, you won't be using a different player interface depending who's hosting the video, you'll just "tune in" with whatever screen you have to hand. And you won't tune in to a "channel", either.

The trend seems clear: from a handful of channels a few years ago, to dozens or even hundreds of channels, which have a tenuous individual identity inside larger brands. Do people really notice if something's on ITV3 rather than ITV2, as long as they can find it in the listings? And then you have the "+1" channels ("Dave" apparently got its name to avoid launching "UKTV G2 +1"), hidden "interactive" channels (like when the BBC show several tennis matches at once), mixed content "HD" channels, and finally the growing range of "video on demand" services - the iPlayer, itvPlayer, etc.

So who needs channels? Why not just have an entire internet full of different TV programs, and watch what you like, when you like?

TV channels do still provide a few services which would need fulfilling in a fully "opened up" Internet TV scenario. Most obviously, they provide the contractual conduit that gets money from advertisers, or subscribers, to the people that actually make the content; and the technical conduit that gets the content onto people's screens. Someone will always have to have that "broadcaster" role, but they won't be limited by anything as old-fashioned as "airtime".

But channels also provide a kind of recommendation service - the fact that something's showing on a particular channel tells the would-be viewer something about it. With on-demand technology, I see this as the job of aggregators - services who put together "playlists" of recommendations. maybe you just browse the listings and see a review of a new show, by a reviewer you trust. Or maybe you want to sit on your sofa vegging out to cheesy American sitcoms, so you "tune in" to the feed from cheesy-american-sitcoms.tv. And if something comes on you don't want, just press "skip"...

Not everything's "on demand" of course - there's still value in that "did you see the latest episode last night" buzz, and there's plenty of scope for live TV, and even interactive TV. But the news is already a channel, not a programme, and even if they don't run for 24-hours a day, there's no reason The X-Factor and Coronation Street can't stand on their own, too. With a prominent "broadcast by ITV" logo, obviously.

Obviously, there are plenty of problems to be worked out - not just technical, but legal and financial: who pays who what for the rights to these programmes? do you insist on "broadcasters" using geographic restrictions, or do you just charge for a global licence? for that matter, what rights do end-users get, and how do they pay for them? But given that I live in a Freeview-less area, I'm hopeful that by the time we lose the analogue signal, we just won't care, because the cutting edge will have moved on...