Acknowledging that so-called cloud computing will blur the distinctions between computers and networks, about two dozen big information technology companies plan to announce a new standards-setting group for computer networking. The group, to be called the Open Networking Foundation, hopes to help standardize a set of technologies pioneered at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, and meant to make small and large networks programmable in much the same way that individual computers are. The changes, if widely adopted, would have implications for global telecommunications networks and large corporate data centers, but also for small household networks. The benefits, proponents say, would be more flexible and secure networks that are less likely to suffer from congestion. Someday, they say, networks might even be less expensive to build and operate. The new approach could allow for setting up on-demand "express lanes" for voice and data traffic that is time-sensitive. Or it might let big telecommunications companies, like Verizon or AT&T, use software to combine several fiber optic backbones temporarily for particularly heavy information loads and then have them automatically separate when a data rush hour is over. For households, the new capabilities might let Internet service providers offer remote services like home security or energy control. The foundation's organizers also say the new technologies will offer ways to improve computer security and could possibly enhance individual privacy within the e-commerce and social networking markets. Those markets are the fastest-growing uses for computing and network resources. While the new capabilities could be crucial to network engineers, for business users and consumers the changes might be no more noticeable than advances in plumbing, heating and air-conditioning. Everything might work better, but most users would probably not know- or care- why or how. The members of the Open Networking Foundation will include Broadcom, Brocade, Ciena, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Facebook, Force10, Google, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Juniper, Marvell, Microsoft, NEC, Netgear, NTT, Riverbed Technology, Verizon, VMWare and Yahoo. "This answers a question that the entire industry has had, and that is how do you provide owners and operators of large networks with the flexibility of control that they want in a standardized fashion." said Nick McKeown, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford, where his and colleagues' work forms part of the technical underpinnings, called OpenFlow. The effort is a departure from the traditional way the Internet works. As designed by military and academic experts in the 1960s, the Internet has been based on interconnected computers that send and receive packets of data, paying little heed to the content and making few distinctions among the various types of senders and receivers of information. The intelligence in the original Internet was meant to reside largely at the end points of the network-the computers-while the specialized routing computers were relatively dumb post offices of various size, mainly confined to reading addresses and transferring packets of data to adjacent systems. But these days, when cloud computing means a lot of the information is stored and processed on computers out on the network, there is growing need for more intelligent control systems to orchestrate the behavior of thousands of routing machines. It will make it possible, for example, for managers of large networks to program their network to prioritize certain types of data, perhaps to ensure quality of service or to add security to certain portions of a network. The designers argue that because OpenFlow should open up hardware and software systems that control the flow of Internet data packets, systems that have been closed and proprietary, it will cause a new round of innovation focused principally upon the vast computing systems known as cloud computers.