That was the question asked by the New York Times in this article.

If you were in for the short answer and want to leave that quickly… here it is. No.

What I really liked about this article how that “growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over”.

Start over? What happen when you start over? Ask Netscape, dBase, and many other. Joel Spolsky have written this inside his blog in April 2000. Close to 9 years ago and I still agree with him. But those are private company that failed because they were in a competition with other companies. That can’t be true for the internet right? The current network is now spread to pretty much all countries in the world. The United States of America are still among the leaders and the ones bringing bright ideas/technology to improve what we already have. If America were to drop out of the Internet and start their own thing, 2 things would happen.

First the network would stay alive (how many countries can just start over?). And America would seriously lag behind… like Netscape, dBase, etc. Sound familiar? Yep. That’s it’s… starting from scratch.

What I really disliked in the article is that “[…] users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety”. Americans already did this and nobody is really more safe. I’ll refer to my good friend Ben to take over for this one: “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.“.

So… No. There won’t be any new “Internet”. We must focus on what we already have. Like Joel Spolsky already wrote in this April 2000 article, “It’s harder to read code than to write it”. Taken on an IT side, it would mean that it’s harder to understand how everything is working than to just start over and start from scratch. Starting from scratch is easy because you have a green field but just like the current network, it would become really fast as close to what it is today. If it’s faster, people will find bigger things to transfer. If it’s safer, people will find bug in the software somewhere and exploit them. If you have less freedom… that will always be gone.

So stop complaining. Fight for Net Neutrality but please stop believing that starting anew will solve all your problems. Most of the time… it only bring other problems that you haven’t seen before and nothing would have really changed.