The biggest barrier to Internet stability isn't a lack of standards, though. The Internet's so-called peering problem must be solved before any introduction of QoS and stability standards could work. If enough systems ran such protocols, the Internet could be prone to the kinds of congestion problems that arose in the late 1980s. It may be that we need to consider a form of packet filtering or policing at the edge of the network that would prevent unruly applications from undermining network stability. The second issue is the way Internet tools operate.
Browsers are exceptionally uncontrollable information terminals.
Anyone who has surfed the Web has run into sites that seize the system, making it impossible to do anything other than follow what that site wants followed. It's hard to imagine corporate America ceding its critical workers' information interface to something with so limited an ability to be controlled. Either architecture can be used by a savvy developer to create a stable browser platform for corporate information access, but neither offers all the manageability tools needed in a way that is both easily accessed by developers and standardized for breadth of support. This middleware applet could control access to system resources, certify the trustworthiness of other applets, and provide for management and control interfaces. This concept is being considered in various forms by a number of vendors, including Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Microsoft, but no standards bodies seem to be considering it.