Last year, the level and ferocity of cyber-attacks on the internet reached such a horrendous level that some are now thinking the unthinkable: to let the internet wither on the vine and start up a new more robust one instead.
On being asked if we should start again, many - maybe most - immediately argue that the internet is such an integral part of our social and economic fabric that even considering a change in its fundamental structure is inconceivable and rather frivolous.
I was one of those. However, recently the evidence suggests that our efforts to secure the internet are becoming less and less effective, and so the idea of a radical alternative suddenly starts to look less laughable.
One example of struggling security comes from Neira Jones, head of payment security at Barclaycard. She told me that in the UK alone, identity fraud costs more than £2.7bn every year and affects over 1.8 million people.
We also increasingly have other forms of cyber-attacks from political activists (so called 'hacktivists'), and cyber-espionage and warfare, where the internet has become another stage for global conflict between nations.
We need to understand the root of the problem.
In essence, the internet was never intended to be a secure network. The concept was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) as a means of allowing a distributed computer system to survive a nuclear attack on the US.
Those who designed the Internet Protocol (IP) did not expect that someone might try to intercept or manipulate information sent across it.
As we expanded our use of the internet from large, centralised computers to personal computers and mobile devices, its underlying technology stayed the same.
The internet is no longer a single entity but a collection of 'things' unified by only one item - IP - which is now so pervasive that it is used to connect devices as wide-ranging as cars and medical devices.
Many technologies were then built upon this foundation. The best known was HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) which is what allows web pages such as this to be displayed in the way you view it now.
And, yes, many of these technologies included the ability to secure the data that is being transmitted over the internet. All will have used one of these 'secure' technologies, most usually when buying something over the internet.
