The Clean Slate Program was an interdisciplinary research program at Stanford University which considered how the Internet could be redesigned with a "clean slate", without the accumulated complexity of existing systems but using the experience gained in their decades of development.[1]
Its program director was Nick McKeown.[2][3]
Clean Slate was based on the belief that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure, and that the Internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and backward-compatible style of academic and industrial networking research.[4]
The research program focused on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network's ossification. To this end, the program was characterized by two research questions:[citation needed]
"With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?"[citation needed]
"How should the Internet look in upcoming 15 years?"[2]
Program coordinators identified five key areas for research:[4]