Your News Feature about reinventing Internet technology is timely (Nature 463, 602–604; 2010). Complementary initiatives to the US projects are under way in Europe.

The European initiatives are geared to improving information-sharing over the Internet by radically changing network operation. Content storage will be a core service across applications — unlike in traditional networking, which treats storage as an application property. The new focus will decouple global publishing and consuming from local actions of sending and receiving between network nodes.

Social networking can optimize the Internet for purposes other than security. The rise of mobile-phone-based networking makes the handset a primary device for securely locating an individual. Combining knowledge of users' interests and locations will allow us to track demand for multimedia and optimize delivery of content, as well as to predict areas of demand and minimize energy usage. It will be important to guard user privacy while doing so.

At present, only a single path is enabled between two end points at any time for Internet users. This restriction can be lifted for devices with two or more networks, such as mobile phones with both WiFi and 3G. These will mitigate temporary problems with either network and help to balance Internet traffic.