May 19-20, 2014
Washington, DC
MEETING PLAN and AGENDA PROJECT REPORTS Since this was the first meeting of the Next Phase awards, the first part of the meeting was a review of the three funded projects. MobilityFirst:
Named Data Networks
Expressive Intenet Architecture
DISCUSSION OF NETWORK NEUTRALITY Since the topic of "network neutrality" was getting a lot of attention at the time of this meeting, we asked each of the projects to discuss how a neutrality regulation might apply to their architecture. The session was framed as follows: The topic of network neutrality is “hot” right now, but the term itself is more of a rallying cry than a technical or regulatory proposal. The recent reversals of the FCC in the US courts with respect to NN have motivated a deeper consideration of the issues. What the court said is that the FCC cannot impose blanket rules against blocking or discrimination, but they can act to remedy specific harms. This ruling requires that we look past the superficial banner of neutrality and ask what the harms are that concern us, and which actors are harmed. Some advocates of NN are concerned with protecting the developers of applications and content, others with protecting the broadband access customer. We could also consider harms to the state, and to other classes of actors. The goal of this session is not to discuss regulatory options or objectives, but to consider the ways in which different architectures may shift the balance of power among the actors, and thus shift the capacity to control the imposition of harms. Each design induces some sort of structure among the set of actors that make up the system (and the actors relevant to the various environments). What is the balance of power among those actors? What are the dependencies among these actors? Are there ways in which the design reduces the opportunity for one set of actors (e.g., ISPs) to exercise discrimination or limitation on the actions of another? For example, most observers of the market today assume that the broadband access providers have a position with significant market power, and they the power to discriminate with respect to both customers and providers of higher-level services. Is this outcome a universal for all FIA proposals? The goal of this question is not to discuss the current dynamics of the debates in Washington, but to understand how those debates might be different in your system.
DISCUSSION WITH THE LSN ATTENDEES We invited members of the Large Scale Networking (LSN) Committee of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program to attend this meeting. We invited discussion and feedback about the FIA projects and their future trajectories.
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Contact David Clark <ddc@csail.mit.edu> with questions or comments.
Content of this page extracted from NSF FIA solicitation and press release. See links above for full text.