Tussle in cyberspace: defining tomorrow's Internet

The architecture of the Internet is based on a number of principles, including the self-describing datagram packet, the end-to-end arguments, diversity in technology and global addressing. As the Internet has moved from a research curiosity to a recognized component of mainstream society, new requirements have emerged that suggest new design principles, and perhaps suggest that we revisit some old ones. This paper explores one important reality that surrounds the Internet today: different stakeholders that are part of the Internet milieu have interests that may be adverse to each other, and these parties each vie to favor their particular interests. We call this process "the tussle". Our position is that accommodating this tussle is crucial to the evolution of the network's technical architecture. We discuss some examples of tussle, and offer some technical design principles that take it into account.

[1]  E. Rowland.  Theory of Games and Economic Behavior , 1946, Nature.

[2]  J. Nash.  Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games. , 1950, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[3]  William Vickrey,et al.  Counterspeculation, Auctions, And Competitive Sealed Tenders , 1961 .

[4]  William A. Wulf,et al.  Policy/mechanism separation in Hydra , 1975, SOSP.

[5]  Kenneth G. Binmore,et al.  Essays on Foundations of Game Theory , 1982 .

[6]  Jerome H. Saltzer,et al.  End-to-end arguments in system design , 1984, TOCS.

[7]  Radia J. Perlman,et al.  Network layer protocols with Byzantine robustness , 1988 .

[8]  D. Edge,et al.  The social shaping of technology , 1988 .

[9]  Yakov Rekhter,et al.  EGP and policy based routing in the new NSFNET backbone , 1989, RFC.

[10]  David D. Clark,et al.  Policy routing in Internet protocols , 1989, RFC.

[11]  R. Westrum.  The Social Construction of Technological Systems , 1989 .

[12]  Kirk Lougheed,et al.  Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) , 2021, IP Routing Protocols.

[13]  S. Woolgar.  Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials , 1990 .

[14]  B. Latour.  Technology is Society Made Durable , 1990 .

[15]  M. Callon.  Techno-economic Networks and Irreversibility , 1990 .

[16]  Joseph Farrell,et al.  Choosing How to Compete: Strategies and Tactics in Standardization , 1994 .

[17]  C. Shapiro,et al.  Systems Competition and Network Effects , 1994 .

[18]  N. Economides.  The Economics of Networks , 1995 .

[19]  Joan Feigenbaum,et al.  Decentralized trust management , 1996, Proceedings 1996 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[20]  William E. Moen,et al.  Realizing the information future: The internet and beyond , 1996 .

[21]  W. Lehr.  Compatibility Standards And Industry Competition: Two Case Studies , 1996 .

[22]  David A. Wagner,et al.  Privacy-enhancing technologies for the Internet , 1997, Proceedings IEEE COMPCON 97. Digest of Papers.

[23]  Clayton M. Christensen.  The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail , 2013 .

[24]  Kristin Braa,et al.  Technology as traitor: emergent SAP infrastructure in a global organization , 1998, ICIS '98.

[25]  Stefan Savage,et al.  Sting: A TCP-based Network Measurement Tool , 1999, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[26]  Stefan Savage,et al.  TCP congestion control with a misbehaving receiver , 1999, CCRV.

[27]  Lawrence Lessig,et al.  Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace , 1999 .

[28]  Joan Feigenbaum,et al.  The KeyNote Trust-Management System Version 2 , 1999, RFC.

[29]  Jim Boyle,et al.  Accept-Ranges : bytes Content-Length : 55967 Connection : close Content-Type : text / plain Internet Draft , 2012 .

[30]  Anna R. Karlin,et al.  Practical network support for IP traceback , 2000, SIGCOMM.

[31]  Benjamin M. Compaine,et al.  Rethinking The Design Of The Internet: The End-To-End Arguments Vs. The Brave New World , 2001 .

[32]  David D. Clark,et al.  Rethinking the design of the Internet , 2001, ACM Trans. Internet Techn..

[33]  Anna R. Karlin,et al.  Network support for IP traceback , 2001, TNET.

[34]  Telecommunications Board.  Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits , 2002 .

[35]  Joan Feigenbaum,et al.  Distributed algorithmic mechanism design: recent results and future directions , 2002, DIALM '02.

[36]  Hari Balakrishnan,et al.  Resilient overlay networks , 2001, SOSP.

[37]  Thomas E. Anderson,et al.  Protocol design in an uncooperative internet , 2002 .

[38]  Dominique Vinck,et al.  Everyday Engineering. An ethnography of Design and Innovation , 2003 .

[39]  A. Bruni.  The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.) , 2003 .

[40]  Xiaowei Yang,et al.  NIRA: a new Internet routing architecture , 2003, FDNA '03.