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Van Schewick on Zittrain on Generativity

By Lawrence Solum

I wanted to specially note one of the posts in the Future of the Internet Symposium, hosted by Concurring Opinions. Generative End Hosts vs. Generative Networks? by by Barbara van Schewick is especially keen. Here is a taste:

On the one hand, the network has become more opaque. The broad version of the end-to-end arguments requires the lower layers of the network to be very general; they should not be optimized in favor of specific applications. In the current Internet, asymmetric bandwidth to and from the home, network address translators and firewalls all implicitly optimize the network for the needs of client-server applications, creating difficulties for applications with different needs. In particular, network address translators and firewalls, taken together, have made it very difficult to develop and deploy new applications whose mode of operations differs from client-server applications. This applies, for example, to peer-to-peer applications, applications that use UDP, and applications that use one signaling connection to set up a second connection. Network address translators and firewalls have also made it almost impossible to deploy new transport protocols, leading to ?ossification? of the transport layer (for more on this, see my book, pp. 385-386). Thus, deviations from the broad version of the end-to-end arguments create serious problems for innovation in new applications and transport layer protocols today.

At the same time, the network has become more controllable. A network based on the broad version of the end-to-end arguments is application-blind; as a result, network providers are unable to see which applications are using their networks and to control their execution. By contrast, in the current Internet, devices for deep packet inspection, i.e. devices in the network that can look into data packets, determine the application or content whose data the packets are carrying and process the packets based on this information, have been widely deployed. Whether network providers have an incentive to use this technology to discriminate against applications on their networks is hotly debated as part of the network neutrality debate. My research and conversations with innovators and venture capitalists (pdf) indicate that the threat of discrimination negatively affects innovation today.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on September 08, 2010 (boomark / email).