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.

New copyright laws need to be enacted immediately IMHO.

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.

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.