Innovation and the Next Generation Internet

In the last few years, academic researchers have begun to question whether the basic Internet architecture is sufficiently sound for long term growth. In this paper, we look at one underlying premise behind the argument: that innovation in the basic Internet infrastructure has become stalled and that the Internet architecture no longer supports innovation. We use Clayton Christensen´s innovation theory to frame the present work. We discuss two innovation trends - cloud computing and control/data plane separation - that are not likely to change the Internet architecture, and a new global communication network architecture under investigation - Information centric Networking - that could. Our conclusion is that, based on the commercial forces that have driven the Internet´s evolution since the mid-1990s, and absent a major change in the expected performance metric from customers, an innovative new global communication architecture different from the Internet is unlikely to be deployed.