Understanding next-generation Internet

The term next-generation Internet is increasingly common. Almost every system, application, protocol, and product has a next-generation version. There is a White House NGI Initiative, and nearly every major university networking community and institute in the world has some kind of "next Internet" project. There is no single future NGI manifestation, The Internet has grown far too complicated and diverse in its technologies, players, markets, and uses. Perhaps most important, the Internet itself has become a combination incentive and enabling mechanism for an almost incomprehensible number of autonomous development and entrepreneurial activities that constantly come into existence, and have global reach and effect. It has become its own self-sustaining means of reinvention. Ultimately, whatever emerges will be some kind of constantly evolving, grand recursive concatenation of all the myriad next-generation developments within developments.