One of the prominent people behind the current internet discusses the history (telephony, wire oriented), the current (IP, endpoint oriented) and the future (?, data oriented) at google tech talks.
A short synopsis: the internet is having trouble at the moment for it has been designed in a time the problem was different. In these days most of the data is duplicate data, which is a tremendous waste. Also connecting to the internet (getting an address) (and resulting from that keeping everything in sync) is hard. Van suggests and predicts a data oriented internet. A bit like a secure P2P bittorrent network, but instead of on top of IP on the IP level.
It’s a very interesting talk, worth watching.