China's next-generation internet is a world-beater

THE net is getting creaky and old: it is rapidly running out of space and remains fundamentally insecure. And it turns out China is streets ahead of the West in doing anything about it.

A report published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society last week details China's advances in creating a next-generation internet that is on a national level and on a larger scale than anything in the West.

At the root of the problem are "two major gaps in the architecture of the internet", according to a report from the New England Complex Systems Institute, compiled in 2008 for the US Navy and released to the public this week. First up is the internet's inability to block malicious traffic as a whole. While malware can rapidly replicate and distribute itself across the net, organisations can only respond to individual instances of online aggression.