Moving beyond TCP/IP1 Fred Goldstein and John Day for the Pouzin Society – June 2011. The triumph of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol suite in today’s market is nearly complete. A monoculture of networking has emerged, based on protocols originally developed in the 1970s. With a near-universal use of IP for purposes well beyond the original designers’ intent, conventional wisdom holds that all future solutions must slowly evolve from it. This belief, however popular, is not necessarily correct. The Internet itself has been a popular success in large part because of its low-price business model. IP has absorbed the glow from the Internet’s halo. People confuse the Internet with its protocols. But they are not the same thing. TCP/IP has been a 30-year distraction from real internetworking. In a real sense, it is the networking equivalent of Microsoft DOS (Disk Operating System). For the Internet to prosper in the long term, it needs to move beyond TCP/IP. TcP/IP WAs designed for allmited set of tasks TCP/IP was designed for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a Department
of Defense resource-sharing network. When the ARPANET began in 1969, it demonstrated the then-radical notion of packet switching. The original ARPANET protocol, Network Control Program (NCP), was designed to ensure reliability of transmission on a hop-by-hop basis.