[Chapter-delegates] Next Generation Internet initiative => input requested

[Michiel Leenaars]

Dear all,


while quite a few of you are hopefully enjoying holidays, there is
something really interesting for your brains to chew on. The European
Commission will fund a series of new internet related R&D programmes
through an initiative called "Next Generation Internet". This is going
to be the umbrella for the remaining part of H2020 and for its follow
up five year funding scheme. Obviously, there is a lot of accrued
techical debt as well as the pervasive surveillance issue that involves
heavy plumbing work at internet scale. That kind of public money could
be essential to make a real change possible (or rather: many smaller
changes, some fundamental and nearly invisible and others more
prominent).

NLnet foundation (where I happen to be director of strategy) and Gartner
have been made responsible for writing the overall vision for this
initiative, as well as gather and prioritize key research topics. Of
course we would not dare embark on such a huge and critical task without
engaging organisations like Internet Society (through ISOC.nl) as well
as actively consulting other key communities and organisations like RIPE
(the European RIR), GEANT (the association of Research and Educational
Networks, EDRi (the European umbrella for digital rights
organisations), CENTR (association of domain name registries), FSFE
(Free Software community), EURO-iX (association of internet exchanges),
etc.

For that purpose, your ideas and vision for a better internet are much
appreciated. What are the urgent problems that need to be solved? We
want to gather as many skeletons from the closet and pile them up - so
that it becomes very obvious that there are really important and urgent
'boring' things that should be handled before we move to anything else.

I feel this is a *really* huge opportunity to channel very meaningful
amounts of money to large and particularly stubborn problems. Public
funding can help overcome the 'tragedy of the commons' in a sustainable
way, through for instance open standards and open source efforts that
significantly lower the threshold of adoption. We can also propose
regulatory needs to accompany those efforts.

What would be an intervention logic which could make the internet
a significantly better place for users? More robust, more trustworthy,
more inclusive? How do we hand an internet to future generations
that is as open and permissionless as the early internet? What would you
fund, and why? What is the thing that could make the biggest difference
for the end users of the internet? 

I'd love to hear your thoughts - over this list or directly to me. The
sooner we receive input, the better - the process at the EC moves at a
very fast pace. Your direct replies are confidential, and a short
submission of a few lines is therefore not a problem.  

Best,
Michiel Leenaars

P.S. You can also use https://nlnet.nl/NGI for anonymous input. That
webpage also contains some background info. 

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