In Computer Science we face a rather special challenge: We Build What We Measure. We don’t really have Nature to test our theories for the structure of systems. This makes it very difficult to know what is principle and what is an artifact of the engineering decisions.

This has lead to a somewhat "anything that works is good" attitude and has contributed to the master craftsman approach that seems to dominate recently. History indicates that artisan approaches come to rely on tradition and ultimately stagnate. We are already seeing this.

This is not science.

For the last decade or more, the research community has been considering the problem of a new theory or architecture for networking. They seem no closer now that they were when they started.

The Pouzin Society, named after Louis Pouzin, the inventor of datagrams and connectionless networking, announces its initial organizing meeting. The society’s purpose is to provide a forum for developing viable solutions to the current Internet architecture crisis.