Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet

Motivation: This paper argue that with growing importance of Internet in
society, different stakeholders may have conflicting interests and they
would compete in order to favor their interests leading to a "tussle". The
network research community should provide a playground for this tussle in
the architectures considered.

This paper is unique as it hinges on the idea that the tussles produced by
social and economic machinery should be accommodated in the technical
architecture. We often design systems keeping robustness, scalability,
reliability in mind but we do not accommodate for social and economic
tussles.
In order to accommodate for these principles, systems should be designed for
choice and they should modularize the design along tussle boundaries.

Lack of trust is definitely a problem that has ensued in the internet at
large. Also, the same functionality may assume very different roles in
different contexts. For example, cops want to be able to tap into terrorist
orgranizations' online activities but at the same time, people want privacy
and dont want authorities to be able to tap into their communication. So,
although the existence of a tussle has been singled out, it becomes
difficult to accommodate both ideas and any system that is proposed would
bias the tussle.

However, I would like to argue that its not always possible to predict even
the presence of a tussle. For example, China censoring the internet is an
example where we could not have predicted that a tussle would surface
because of a third party ( government ) acting as a censor between the
provider and the consumer. To be able to predict all tussles would be
ambitious and thus, designs should be open and flexible to change which
leads to the idea of minimalistic design. Also, since it would be difficult
to predict these tussles, it would be impossible to modularize along tussle
boundaries. Another problem that I see is that sometimes user empowerment
may not be desired. ( Think of parents wanting to avoid children from
hitting adult content on the web )

Thus, I have a feeling that to design for choice translates to not design at
all as shifting the burden to the designer to predict all tussles and their
boundaries may require knowledge of the future evolution and needs.
Nonetheless, this paper brings to the forefront a design principle which is
often neglected. This is a very thought provoking paper and I really liked
the discussions made and ideas presented. Atleast its a step in the
direction :)
Received on Tue Nov 28 2006 - 07:09:51 EST