A New Way to look at Networking

GoogleTalksArchive · 25.9K views · 2012-08-22 · 1:21:16

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk on rethinking networking around named content instead of host-to-host conversations. He recounts packet-networking history and lays out the content-centric networking idea that later became NDN.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to it as an inspiring talk behind content-addressed designs like IPFS, Urbit and immutable URLs.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2012–2025

Topics

Networking & internet infrastructure Tech pioneers & interviews

What people said

ned · 2014-07 · Strong recommendation
Yes! Ted Nelson talks about this in this amazing and inspiring Google Talk video from 2006. He talks about the rise of packet-based networking, and how the future will be content-centric. [VIDEO]
Read the original HN comment ↗

samatman · 2013-04 · Strong recommendation
I was surprised to command-F for Van Jacobson and not find this lecture, "A New Way to Look at Networking". [VIDEO] Van Jacobson was the major architect of TCP/IP; here is how the Internet would work if he were in charge. If this is ever implemented it will change everything.
Read the original HN comment ↗

mbrubeck · 2013-09 · Recommendation
The thing that got me interested in Urbit when it was first announced back in 2010 was reading Van Jacobson's "Networking Named Content" paper [1] and related work from PARC, referenced in this blog post [2]. As someone who has spent 15 years now working on web development, browser development, and web standards, I feel the Internet really needs some form of "named data" networking as its next big step. I don't know if Urbit is the way it's going to happen, but it'll happen somehow. Maybe we'll evolve browsers and HTTP into a named data network instead. (On the one hand, it would be orders of magnitude easier than building an entire new model of computing from scratch... on the other hand, you don't get to throw out the whole ball of mud if you just keep building on top of it.) Anyway, I encourage everyone to read the Van Jacobson paper or watch the tech talk. It points out some assumptions that are so baked into our network architectures that I had never really thought about them. And it gives some context for these slides' claim that "the internet has failed," by pointing to a working alternate system that's a better fit for some common cases. The link from the Urbit blog to the Van Jacobson talk is broken since Google Video was shut down, but you can now find it on YouTube [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]
Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by GoogleTalksArchive, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks

SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources