Review: Tussle in Cyberspace

The internet was created by the research community with a sole purpose of
connecting all the computers in the world together to share data. The
design philosophy was simple; to have a network with self describing
datagram packets, diversity in technology and global addressing with all
the stakeholders sharing the same vision. This along with the openness of
internet has made internet a big success and now it has become mainstream
components of a society involving players who have varied interests and
expectations that may be adverse to each other. These varied and adverse
interests are being referred as tussles in this paper. Author believes
that these tussles impose new requirements on the internet’s technical
architecture and in this paper author has discussed the new requirements
as a consequence of tussles between different stakeholders and purposed
some design strategies to come up with a solution that tries to satisfy
each stakeholder.

The idea of this paper is to modularize the design along tussle
boundaries. Though the author believes that the idea is new but in my
opinion this has existed since the time internet was created. Tussle in my
view is basically stating the difference in functional requirements
expected by different stakeholders in a non-technical way, so to say that
modularize the design along tussle boundaries is basically restating the
fact the design should be modularized based on the functionality which I
have been hearing since childhood. The second main principle mentioned by
the author is to design the solution that caters the preference of
different players e.g. there might be some users who want to choose their
SMTP based on different features provided by the server and still there
will be uses who would like to avoid this complexity of configuring the
service. But the idea is interest of both the users should be addressed in
the design.

The interesting section of this paper is where the author has examined the
different tussle spaces and has tried to apply the above stated principle
to guide the technical design. The most important aspect affecting the
internet is the tussle of economics. The tussle is resolves around the
ability of users to shift ISPs, the idea of value pricing and competitive
market place for broadband service providers. Secondly the author has
discussed the tussle of trust and openness. The trust tussle implies that
mechanisms that regulate the interaction on the basis of mutual interest
should be a fundamental part of the Internet. The openness insures the
innovations and user’s freedom over choices which the author believes
should be part of future architecture as it was in past. Overall I believe
the paper was both bad not good because it has old ideas stated in a
different way and also it seems as if the author has tried to prolong the
paper just to fulfill the conference requirements about paper size.
Received on Tue Nov 28 2006 - 07:59:01 EST