These are two incomplete network architectures that have exaggerated design features. We thus explore advantages of network architectures that differ significantly from today’s Internet. Internet is centralized in several ways require central administration. Both of these designs avoid central control points.

Digital Silk Road

Internet prescribes certain behaviors, then rewards their opposites. DSR is meant to move data between diverse places, much as Internet. DSR pays close attention to incentives of those who control the pieces of a network. Its rhetoric presumes a simple economy without large institutions to operate major network components. It includes small money thru which to motivate various service providers. It solves the spam problem. It assumes and survives hostile network nodes. It requires re-architecting much of today’s Internet.

Glass Net

Glass net posits a set of distributed nodes to support distributed applications with incidental communication links. Glass net is a trusted network of nodes with untrusted distributed applications running in the nodes. It explores the role of secrecy in ensuring application integrity. I conclude that if authenticated communications are available then secrecy is otherwise not necessary for application integrity. Message authentication codes, which rely on secrecy, can provide authentic messages over links that are vulnerable to inserted messages.

A synthesis