I was watching Vint Cerf on the “Google Analyst Day” event and in the earlier part of the talk he said the dumbness of the network was one of the key points for the explosive growth of Internet. Interestingly he mentioned that it was the most obvious choice and it turned out to be a rather good one. Kind of like Occam’s razor 
.
Many people are working on making the network smarter in many ways, especially when it comes to being totally oblivious to the kind of traffic that flows through it. But making the network intelligent is a dual edge sword – on one end improving differentiation for VoIP traffic can make the network better, but then on the other hand, you have companies like Comcast using the same concept to degrade P2P traffic. Yes the net should be neutral but who will decide?
While I love the idea of dumb networks and smart edges, I think the advances in technology will bring about change – whether we use it for good of bad, like any other science, is up to us and the laws we make.
Here is the video, if you like to watch it: