The Future of Internet
Towards the Future Internet
1 Introductory Remarks: Towards the Future Internet (its governance, neutrality and technical challenges)
Today’s Internet is clearly at crossroads, as it is being transformed from an information service to a critical infrastructure, supporting numerous sectors of the economy and the society’s needs (transport sector, health sector, energy and environment, oil and gas, process control, banking, entertainment, service oriented architectures). As such, both its governance and its technical ability to meet society’s increasing appetite for networked services become critical for its future.
Recent and upcoming events manifest the society’s recognized importance of Internet’s governance, neutrality, policies, economics and marketability. Such events include notably the WSIS conference in Tunis, the IGF in Athens, the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference of November 2006 with 2 resolutions on the Internet, as well as planned IGF for 2007, the OECD Ministerial Conference in 2008, the European Union Spring Council in 2008 that will look into the Internet issue.
Internet’s neutrality has been debated strongly, with fairly opposing views. From interfering with heavy legislation to make sure its freedom and neutrality is protected, to the total freedom and lack of any control to leave the grounds for profitable business and support its commercial potentials.
The question however arises whether the Internet of today is really neutral. How is neutrality ensured in the presence of quality variations, preferential content arrangements and discriminatory packet filtering? Portals can become an instrument for discriminatory arrangements with content providers. Caching and content networks can influence the speed of certain information retrieval and also make the distances matter. Through such mechanisms it is clear that not all content is equal and the Internet of today is not neutral in this regard. Similarly, traffic is not treated in a neutral way. Best effort principle is – in some way – discriminatory against delay sensitive traffic; packet traffic shaping appears to be necessary for greedy applications so that other services are not degraded. Viruses and Spam should – on the other hand – be discriminated against and any neutrality towards such traffic is considered to be a weakness; blacklisting of traffic is also against neutrality. The existence of the type of service flag in the IP Header by itself does not seem to be consistent with the notion of neutrality. Commercial relationships sometimes lead to transit fees and dictate discriminatory routing decisions and packet loss treatment. Finally, there is great imbalance in the usage of the Internet resources: most of them are being used by a small percentage of users/applications.
In addition, the technical challenges that today’s Internet faces are numerous and are outlined through presentations below, including the need to cope with emerging potentially disruptive applications. All facets of Internet challenges (technical, neutrality, governance, economics, commercial, etc) – including joint considerations - need to be addressed through FP7 related R&D.