No one will notice, they must have assumed, if a brilliant engineer of intelligent networks at Bell Labs calls for a new reign of stupidity. But Isenberg made his point. . . . The water in a river, or the data in a Stupid Network, gets to where it must go, adaptively, Innovation is easier, because it occurs on the periphery of the network, isolated from the middle of the network by layered protocols and clean interfaces. . . .
Dumb nets are underspecified. . . .
So is a system of roads. Its traffic can be anything from pedestrians to cars to monster 18-wheel trucks. The owner of each vehicle determines the vehicle's contents. Each vehicle, like each packet in an IP network, is under its own control. And like the Internet, the system of roads is a self-organizing system.