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] Program coordinators identified five key areas for research:[4] The Clean Slate Program ceased in January 2012, after spawning four major follow-up projects:[1][5]