Socio-economic Challenges for the Internet of the Future: The Case of Congestion Control

The Internet is founded on a very simple premise: sharing! Shared communications links are more efficient than dedicated connections that lie idle much of the time. Hence the rules we use for sharing are extremely vital for the healthy operation of the Internet ecosystem and directly affect the value of the network to its users. It becomes a great paradigm of merging the disciplines of computer science and economics, and presents a great number of challenges to the Internet research community. In this talk we will discuss a number of questions like: what is wrong with todays Internet sharing technologies? Are these consistent with economics? More specifically, is TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) sensible from an economic point of view? Which network sharing technologies justify end-toend from an economics perspective? What is required to make P2P (peer-topeer) a blessing instead of a curse? Are there bad applications or just inefficient combinations of sharing technologies and pricing schemes? This keynote will survey some of these systems management issues and the emerging approaches to solve them.