Brett Sheffield would like to have a chat about #multicast and #DickFosbury.

If you have an idea for a FOSS project or already have a FOSS project you can apply at : https://nlnet.nl/propose/

Part of the Submission for NGI Assure Fund in 2021:

TL;DR - we use multicast. (Almost) everything else uses unicast.

I could mention MBONE or Castgate or P2P or Blockchain, but instead lets talk about the sport of high jumping.

At the 1968 Olympics Dick Fosbury won gold in the high jump using a new jumping technique we now call the "Fosbury Flop"[0]. This was a whole new approach to jumping that involved arching the body over the bar so that the centre of gravity passes under the bar, allowing greater jump heights than ever seen before. No one else did this. All the experts, the coaches, the top athletes in the world did it the old way. They were all "experts" and they were all wrong. Soon after that event, the approach took hold and it become the standard.

Multicast is our Fosbury Flop.

Dick Fosbury used the same laws of physics that were available to anyone else at the time. He just noticed something that everyone else had missed and used it.

Multicast has been around for a long time too but the experts of today still think in terms of unicast (and in some cases IPv4!). We aim to change that, by proving that multicast is better in a lot of ways that matter. If we want a more scalable, human rights respecting and secure Internet, we need multicast.

Unicast has a source and destination address on every packet. Unicast therefore allows for geo-blocking and other rights-infringing methods. Multicast does not.

Today we watch live-streaming [1] events over the Internet using unicast. Various Internet exchanges (IXPs) Tweet about it when they reach some new peak traffic level during a popular event. This is insane. Multicast solved this problem decades ago. Even the broken multicast we have today can deal with this. Think of all the extra servers, networking equipment, CDNs and other unnecessary equipment and the carbon footprint that represents! Multicast is better for the environment. Multicast can lower costs, which is why this project will succeed where other efforts (like IPv6 deployment) have lagged. If we can demonstrate the obvious benefits of multicast, including the billions of euros it can save, there is an irresistible incentive to deploy it globally.

Now, we can tell everyone this, but they won't believe us. Nor should they! Like Dick Fosbury, we need to jump that bar and show you by building real-world applications that demonstrate the benefits of multicast. To do that, we need this funding.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_Flop

[1] Less obvious is that multicast can also benefit video-on-demand services and is actually better suited to non-streaming and non realtime applications. We have been approved to run a Fed4Fire+ experiment to demonstrate this using our lcsync multicast file syncing tool.

This project was funded through the NGI Assure Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 957073.