There’s a common science fiction concept about eventually separating data from static infrastructure. A huge part of how data flows through the Internet is guided by not just the cables that it flows through, but vast datacenters built up for specific purposes by corporations across the world. For the most part, these centers are not shared between them—they’re constructed, christened, and leased but they’re not really part of the wild Internet in the same way the cables of the backbone are.

Xerox PARC, the think-tank research group who brought us such amazing things like the personal computer, mouse, and blue-laser technology has been thinking long and hard on this idea and they’re coming to the conclusion that the next evolution of computer networking must be one that puts the cloud everywhere—especially in the hands of users.

The technology to do this is called CCN (Content-Centric Networking) and it functions through a complex network of smart agents and storage modules that spread throughout the cloud, distribute data, and allow a user to generate intelligently updating queries on their devices that constantly gather information to themselves according to the rules set by the user.

Teresa Lunt, VP and director of the computing science lab at PARC, spoke about this innovation at GigaOM’s Structure conference,

PARC wants to replace all of this by putting the emphasis on the content, not points on the network it travels through. Content is automatically encrypted and cached all over the network, and queried by name and description. “Information is self-organizing, and you don’t have to search for it,” explained Lunt. Think of it like a giant, autonomous mesh network of data. “With today’s network, data moves explicitly,” Lunt said. “With CCN, the data just moves.”

The concept sounds a little puzzling at first, but Lunt said that the implications could be far-reaching, both for end users and enterprises. Users would be able to form autonomous social networks, something that Lunt called “a Facebook without Facebook.com,” with the benefit that the privacy options would be in their hands. Likewise, enterprises wouldn’t have to depend on third-party cloud solutions but could define their own fortune through data.

What she’s talking about is a type of ad-hoc networking that would take advantage of public and private cloud schemes to store and retrieve data combined with in-cloud intelligence to make it sortable. Numerous obstacles stand in the way of this sort of development currently and the primary is that much of the Internet storage out there is privately owned and leased by corporations. Cloud-technology isn’t as much about public access as it is about corporations allowing customers into their clouds.

The GigaOM article mentions that many corporations get around the limitations of the connection-centric model by providing access into their clouds and decentralizing content via services like iCloud and Dropbox. Social media and the democratization of communication and news do this very similarly as more software arrives to sieve through feeds and bubble interesting news to the surface for us while suppressing noise. We’ve already seen how humans make excellent contextual engines for data; but CCN would go a step further and create contextualization by the relationships inherent in the data itself.

Content is the medium

Lunt explains the need to seek a medium that makes content the motivator of interactions on the Internet more so than the connections that feed it to us. As an example, she mentions the relationships between different data and how they converge on people by using an intelligent tax document. The tax document could use the CCN cloud to query her financial data from her bank, employer, dividends, etc. and keep itself up-to-date as they update their own information. Meaning, anytime she looked at it, she could get an at-a-glance idea as to her financial liability.

Currently, this sort of application would be processed by either the bank or the IRS (offsite) and would do so by moving data into itself and then generating a dashboard. With CCN technology, the document itself residing in the CCN-cloud would provide the queries, authentication, and update itself as new information became available in the other nodes.

Of course, Lunt makes certain to discuss the security and privacy implications of a content-centric networked cloud. Every piece of data floating around in it would be encrypted and authenticated with cryptographic keys—so that the data couldn’t be accessed by the unauthorized and also to make certain that data always knew who it belonged to (to prevent spoofing in the CCN cloud.) Since data would be largely autonomous and spread across the Internet, it would be necessary for it to recognize itself and be able to self-collect when necessary. The current Internet spends a lot of time securing connections; but the CCN-cloud would depend largely on securing these packets of information.

Content-Centric Networking could usher in the Community Cloud Era

PARC is already pushing to see this technology come to fruition by partnering with Samsung, developing CCN open source code for Android, and organizing an open source community at CCNx.org. By these elements combined may not make them Captain Planet, but it certainly delivers a very strong social foundation for the project.

The concepts and driving forces behind CCN would certainly blur the lines between the corporate cloud and the personal cloud—perhaps bringing us into an era of the community cloud—and if it gets as much traction as many PARC initiatives we will see an epoch defining technology grow out of this.