Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow’s Internet Offense by Amit Mondal Courtesy to Ahamed Mohammed/Rice

The paper basically talks about  Accommodating choices in design - Gives flexibility for designers and consumers - Allows innovation - Allows a tussle to occur

 Highlights connection between Engineering and society, …. Good, but issues discussed here not new nor particular to the Internet.  Lacks coherence, discuss complex issues written in books in 10 pages, However sometimes dives into lots of details like Source routing, firewalls etc!  Discuss ethical questions without clearly stating the assumptions or value systems  No concrete value, Things mentioned in this paper are quite obvious but no concrete design guidelines provided.  It talks about more of philosophical issues without any technical advise.

Challenge: Flexibility increases complexity  Flexible designs will be complex  Applications should be written to deal with this complexity  Innovative applications come up….but slowly!

Challenge: Designing for Outcomes  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 happens in the network. This simple idea was powerful in the early days.. but there is much fear that it seems to be eroding..” So what went wrong to the outcome blind internet???? (self-contradicting)

Challenge: Making a tussle space does not solve a problem  Paper does not talk about who wins in the tussle  Allowing a tussle to occur is not a solution Paper’s Example: DNS and Trademarks  Even if we separated trademark names from machine names, trademarks disputes will not disappear “…one could then try to design these latter mechanisms to try to duck the issue of trademark” The SMTP server example: “A user of mail may choose an SMTP server..An ISP might try to control that choice by redirecting packets..”

Challenge: Lots of Choices Confuses Average User  Too much choice does not make a user happy  Confused about choices to make and their consequences  Only informed persons can make correct choices  Configuring and using simple applications becomes hard Papers response to this is unsatisfactory: “..we may see emergence of third parties that rate services (the online catalog of consumer reports) and parties that provide pre-configured software…”  Installing Windows is easier than installing Linux to an average user

Challenge: Little Incentive to Providers of 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.”

Finally, The point of this paper is known already and acted upon  Transport layer provides choice: TCP/UDP  “IP-lock in” is addressed by DHCP and NAT’s  Loose source routing is addressed by overlay routing