Who's up for yet another software-defined net protocol? Cisco wants to see some hands

How about ethical standards?

If they really want to help they can get everybody on board a network architecture and switching protocol that makes it impossible for attackers like the NSA to easily record who is talking to whom.

Cisco is one of the old players whose business model is predicated on the economics of scarcity. They should have been leading a massive build out of bandwidth orders of magnitude larger than it is today. Instead, they concentrated on profit margins and reducing competition to the exclusion of all else.

Cisco is not now and never was about making the network better. It has always been, just like the Telcos, about finding ways to make the network pay for them. If that meant arcane, insecure, limited bandwidth networks then so be it.

Cisco has people with the smarts to know that there are a number of critical problems not addressed by our networks. We are already attaching more devices to an essentially IPv4 network than an IPv4 network can address. That has a variety of implications that do not bode well for the already rising Internet of Things. Nobody should be able to hijack DNS or send SPAM. Nobody should be able to inspect data as it traverses the network. Nobody should be able to hack into homes and hijack appliances. Had the power players involved been focused on providing the best network they knew how we would not be mired in a failed multi-decade transition to the mess that is IPv6. That should have been fixed a decade ago and IANA should be irrelevant. Instead, the use of IPv4 addresses costs one to five dollars a month.

All of the players involved in dealing with networking have proven to be dreadful custodians who routinely put their own interests ahead of anything else. We don't need new standards. We need new standard bearers.