I pretty much concur... with the caveat as you mention the slow but supposedly impending move to IP v 6... and with the idea that the functionality of TCP/IP actually being replaced.... by an equivalent or better protocol/protocol defining mechanism.
I think the first book I saw on IPv6 was circa 1994; even then, it was heralded as the "next big thing", soon to be coming to a network very near you. We are, in fact, much closer to IPv6 now than then. At that point, the software on the edges of the network - on the clients, built into the daemons running on servers providing service to the edge, built into the routers that make the network RUN - just wasn't there. In a very real sense, the technological underpinnings have taken well over a decade to build. The addressing scheme has been worked out for ages; the "experimental" deployment networks for IPv6 have now been shut down. People are very successfully using IPv6 in small-scale networks - think building-level, just-above-small-business level - where they have a relatively strong network staff and good gateways set up between IPv4 (outside) and IPv6 (inside). For new corporate deployments, IPv6 is starting to make a whole lot of sense. [In a lot of cases, ipv4->ipv6 gateways happen to also be corporate border firewalls or proxies.] For home - not so much, yet. Earthlink and others are trying to encourage home users along the path with the development of things like their custom firmware for Linksys 802.11g access points. ;)
Another way we risk this shift away from the Internet is in the calls for building more "Intelligence" into the network (sometimes with 'security' being the driving wedge). Reading David Isenberg's work on the "Rise of the Stupid Network" we see the virtues of the TCP/IP based networks as one where the intelligence of the network is by design at the edges.
Most of the very oldest services surviving on the network - as well as some of the newer ones that are gaining what will be difficult-to-dislodge popularity - take intelligence-at-edge very seriously. Oldsters: mail, usenet. [~35 and ~26 year old services, respectively...] shell connections. Middle-aged services: http [~13 year old - just coming into its teen years] Young services not doing so well: "walled garden" instant messaging programs where a "smart" server is controlled by some corporation. AIM, MSN, Yahoo! IM, etc all fall into this camp. [I would be very, very impressed if any of those three corporations were to commit to providing their IM service in perpetuity forever. I just don't see it happening. Feel free to correct me, vendor representatives ;) ] Young services doing really well: Bittorrent, Jabber-based federated IM [google talk et al..], a few of the other p2p applications. One of the marks of a relatively successful internet service - I think - is that service's resistance to being destroyed or completely disrupted by acts of god or acts of congress. There's not a whole heck of a lot that can be done to disable a service whose spread only requires a couple of operators to exchange IP addresses in order to federate / communicate with each other's servers. The whole DNS could implode, and folks would fairly quickly replace it. There's just not enough "special magic" for ICANN or any other body to completely wreck things. Maybe disrupt for a while -- c.f. the current court battle over spamhaus -- but the replacement engineered would likely be much less prone to a repeat of the same attack. [Hey, even if the central DNS roots went away -- enough of the data is cached *all over the place* that things would not immediately go awry.
I'd also point to conceptual work of Garth Graham - taking the TCP/IP as a form of social contract... where we are all peers. Imagine a reconceptualization of politics in such a frame... I know a number of us are.
It used to be that the social contract was that people behave relatively sanely in order to get Jon Postel (in his IANA guise) to allocate IP addresses for them. I find that I think those days were superior to the current ICANN boondoggles. --elijah