Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow’s Internet by David D. Clark, John Wroclawski Karen R. Sollins, Robert Braden Offense: Ionut Trestian

Main outlines from paper Accommodating choices into Internet design  Allows innovation  Allows tussles to occur  Gives flexibility for designers and customers (is flexibility really the most important thing ?)‏

168 Citations ? “It must perform appropriately in the presence of conflicting or inconsistent higher-level goals among the Internet’s different stakeholders. This is a manifestation of the tussle dilemma discussed in []” “competing solutions to human-friendly naming, thereby allowing the resulting tussle [] to play out through legal and other social channels” Citations substance = it seems that the only merit of this paper is introducing the term “tussle” What was actually the aim of the paper?

Issues with paper (1)‏  It talks more about philosophical issues without any technical advise  Discuss ethical questions without clearly stating the assumptions or value systems (again, is flexibility the most important metric ?)‏  Lacks coherence, discusses complex issues, However sometimes dives into lots of details like Source routing, firewalls etc  Things discussed here not new, actually well known by the community (QoS, multicast...)‏

Issues with paper (2)‏ Intellectual property issues are important But why only when they involve “small potatoes” like me downloading the new Britney Spears video? What about patent issues between big companies, isn't that a tussle? Which of the two causes more harm?

Issues: Flexibility  Flexible designs will be complex  Applications need to deal with this complexity  Innovative applications actually come out but slowly.  Other metrics need to be considered too (availability, price)‏

Issues: Designing for outcome  Paper says “Do not design so as to dictate the outcome”  How can a design proceed without a goal in mind?  Design of the Internet based on “packet in – packet out” functionality..very simple and not designed for any outcome “... packets go in and come out and this is all that happens in the network. This simple idea was powerful in the early days.. but there is much fear that it seems to be eroding..” What should happen in the network?

Issues: User choice Too many choices don't make a user happy. Average user will actually be confused by too many choices and their consequences. It favors the technical savvy and... “..we may see the emergence of third parties that rate services (the online analog of Consumers Reports) and parties that provide pre-configured software to relieve the user of dealing with the details of choice...”

Issues: User choice  Providing more choices is costly  Popular choices will get cheaper (Economies of scale)‏  Users of less popular choices will need to pay more “One should be prepared to pay for what one uses or there is very little incentive for the provider to offer it”

Apocalyptic warnings Internet prices will increase in 5 years due to lack of competition (2008 now and didn't really happen – we're actually getting more bits per buck)‏ Municipal deployment of fiber? Not happening at a large scale.

Finally  Transport layer provides choice: TCP/UDP, even more.  “IP-lock in” is addressed by DHCP and NAT’s (maybe still a problem if you are a service provider – DNS issues).  Loose source routing is addressed by overlay routing.

Thank you ! Questions?