I've been thinking about the motivation for Internet architecture research, and why it seems that no for-profit companies are terribly interested in it right now (at least not compared with NSF, etc.). Most of us tend not to replace the car until it's becoming pretty clear that it needs replacing; parts break (frequently) or it fails to meet changing needs (the curse of the minivan for young families). I think that at the moment, our current Internet architecture tends to meet the needs of users reliably, and thus few entities are willing to fund research into changing that working architecture.
We probably shouldn't condemn anybody for not wanting to fix what ain't broke, but I am glad that there is research going on in a seemingly unwanted area. At some point, there will be breakage (I'm thinking due to problems of scale) or changing needs, which I'm not going to even try to predict. We're already working on the problems we can foresee, and I believe that the experience and knowledge gained will be useful in helping us cope with new and unforeseen demands as well. For instance, we have discovered that testing new network architecture ideas on a large scale is difficult -- networks that big tend to get annoyingly useful to somebody who will complain if the experiment fails and the network is down for a while. Thus we have research in the style of DONA, using techniques that will allow us to use parts of existing architecture to make any necessary transition as painless as possible.
In summation, I quote the Heavy Weapons Guy: "Good job, everyone!"
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