Designing a new Internet with more choices
August 10, 2012
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org
A team of researchers from four U.S. universities is poised to lay out the key components for a networking architecture to serve as the backbone of a new Internet that gives users more choices about which services they use.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) asked the researchers to design a blueprint for a future version of the Internet.
Making choices
The new Internet architecture will hinge on users being able to make choices about which features and services they want to use, and which entities they want to pay to provide those services. As such, the work being done under the NSF grant is guided by three principles:
1). Encourage Alternatives: Any new network must be able to provide different types of services, allowing users to select the service that best meets their needs.
2). Vote With Your Wallet: Any new network must allow users to reward service providers that offer superior and/or innovative services. This will encourage innovation and discourage inferior service.
3). Know What Happened: Any new network must be able to give users and service providers the ability to exchange information about the quality of the service being provided.
This poses a significant challenge, because the current Internet is unable to support the features and mechanisms to implement these three principles.
However, you have to start somewhere. In their short paper, the researchers say that a good first step will be to support the development of alternative services — “including the ability to create alternatives and select among them.”
Researchers on the team come from NC State, UMASS, the University of Kentucky and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The short paper, “Choice as a Principle in Network Architecture,” will be presented at the ACM SIGCOMM 2012 conference in Helsinki, Finland, Aug. 13-17. The work will be presented by Tilman Wolf of UMASS Amherst, who is lead author.
Overview of ChoiceNet architecture (credit: Tilman Wolf et al.)
Comments (11)
by Phil Osborn
These issues are important. Feedback is essential for any system to survive and improve functioning. There are other, larger issues that are not included in this, such as a truly rational approach to filtering.
One area of overlap from #’s 1 & 2 to better filtering was included, as I recall, in the Xanadu spec, as in automatic micropayments, such that a user could specify in advance how much they charged for incoming email, either in general, or from specific people or classes of originators. This automatically took care of spam, as only those advertisers who had a really good idea that you would actually want to purchase their products would pay the toll the recipient required. Of course the system would have to support a low cost implementation of auto-notification on both ends, so that the sender could adjust his filters to maximize return on investment.
For example, Acme Detergents has a new laundry mix that they want to market to people who wash clothes. For agreeing to try this product out, they incorporate a link into the QR code on the carton that is a digital coupon that shows up at the grocery checkout as taken off your bill. To notify you of this opportunity, they mass email to a preselected demographic whose incoming fee for generic ads cannot be over 25 cents. If someone on the receiving end bumps the fee to 25000 dollars at random times to try to grab the bucks from some unwary adman, it won’t work, because the handshake has to be there when the packets start arriving.
by liventruth
IMHO any information I generate should be properly compensated…
by liventruth
And btw. There are so many :free: apps that scour your data. Fuck that.
by liventruth
Yes, thhis article did hit a “nerve”…. more of a twitch really. Just throwing out a few blatantly emotional responses. In retrospect I would like to encourage Ray and the US GOV to inspect Corporational espionage. And the theft of personal data
New copyright laws need to be enacted immediately IMHO.
by Remi Tippetts
The implication that customers can’t conveniently pay for services or that providers can’t currently track usage/infrastructure metrics, customer satisfaction, and revenue is utter nonsense. There is a huge sea of services to choose from with extremely refined monitoring.
I’m surprised this paper came from Universities funded by the NSF. Stripped of that information I would assume it was manufactured by telecoms that want to end the free internet and introduce tiered structures and more pay walls. The last two paragraphs of the paper all but explicitly endorse the same sort of crap Comcast wants to pull with Netflix and attempt to portray that behavior as an advancement. You have to be crazy or working for a telecom to think that’s either a technological or civic advancement. A financial advancement for local telecom monopolies perhaps, but a huge downgrade for end users. “Drive continued innovation”? Ludicrous.
by asiwel
It is not complete stupidity to skip through all the legal mumbo-jumbo (Terms of Service, etc.). After all, if you don’t accept meekly, that’s it … no installation, no app, etc. And this comes AFTER you paid for the thing. There is, however, little excuse for not at least skimming the documentation … before using the program and complaining about it … Of course, that problem is rapidly going away, because the documentation is rapidly disappearing too .. or is lost in the cloud behind too many access steps, only to find poorly written unhelpful stuff (with a nice set of buttons DID THIS HELP? YES or NO). Obviously, this article hit a nerve!
by liventruth
NO
by Rick Vogel
I read the paper, and it talks about a new network architecture to support future internet evolution, not a completely new internet. Further I do not grasp where all of these hurdles are not being addressed within the current internet architecture (at least in the US, I cannot comment on the global scale).
1). Encourage Alternatives: Any new network must be able to provide different types of services, allowing users to select the service that best meets their needs.
I’m pretty sure the provider choices we have (that offer varying feeds and speeds), cloud services offerings, and various hardware choices we have available at this time meet this criteria. Corporations and users pay all kinds of different rates for internet services, and available bandwidths, at this time.
2). Vote With Your Wallet: Any new network must allow users to reward service providers that offer superior and/or innovative services. This will encourage innovation and discourage inferior service.
This is already happening on the current internet, and has been since AOL, Yahoo, etc… first started competing for users (the war is still raging between Microsoft and Google). Secondly, why should all services be pay services, I don’t want to vote with my wallet, I want to vote with my words and contribute to open source projects that do not further burden society so some corporation can please their shareholders with additional profits. I certainly don’t want to be tied into a network on which the only available applications and services come at monetary expense.
3). Know What Happened: Any new network must be able to give users and service providers the ability to exchange information about the quality of the service being provided.
Not sure I quite grasp what you’re saying. We have e-mail, chat, ticketing support systems, customer surveys, dedicated networks for customer experience feedback, automated network monitoring, google analytics, etc… that more than provide adequate mediums for customer interaction and feedback on user experience. You cannot get feedback from a network, about the complete user experience, without user input. A new network architecture is not going to solve the problem of a majority of users who do not want to provide feedback about every transaction they’re involved in.
Overall, (personal opinion based on simply this post and the attached two page paper) this project seems like a lot of effort for very little gain.
by Bri
Very emphatic. Why is it so nessesary, particularly in relation to corporation?
by liventruth
LIVE CHAT SUPPORT IS NECESSARY FOR ANY CORPORATION TO PROSPER
by liventruth
IMHO it is imperative to inform the public of what they are accepting tacitly when they click on anything or accept anything as an app. The TOS are so long and tedious NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT MIND has the time to analyze them. I feel that this is an injustice to Americans and a way for corporations to profit off the stupid. Me Included. :)