Saturday, September 26, 2009

NN Papers at TPRC

The TPRC has a huge number of papers that bear on the net neutrality debate. That is because, to some extent net neutrality stands at the intersection of issues of competition, technology, economics, first amendment – and others. Take a look at the program, if you aren’t familiar with TPRC, which is one of the best telecom conferences in the country every year. (Disclosure: I’m on the program committee, and will chair it for next year’s conference.)

Nevertheless, some papers are more expressly directed at the NN debate. Here’s a list (and a one- or two-sentence summary by me).

The Evolution of Internet Congestion
- Steve Bauer, David Clark, William Lehr: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(How does TCP manage bandwidth demands, and what alternatives are being developed. Calls for policies that continue to allow experimentation with alternative protocols.)

Congestion Pricing and Quality of Service Differentiation in Internet Traffic
- Guenter Knieps, Albert Ludwigs Universitat Freiburg
(Develops a pricing model for QoS tiers on services that accounts for externalities created by higher-tier quality on the congestion present in lower tiers.)

Peer to Peer Edge Caches Should be Free
- Nicholas Weaver, ICSI
(Proposes deployment of freely-available P2P caches by local ISPs, which will decrease costs and congestion by keeping P2P traffic local. Develops an authentication mechanism to address ISP concerns about hosting ‘bad’ content.)

Invoking and Avoiding the First Amendment: How Internet Service Providers Leverage Their Status as Both Content Creators and Neutral Conduits
- Rob Frieden, Penn State
(ISPs seem to have qualities of both neutral conduits and speakers. As ISPs as conduits exercise of traffic management may cause ISPs to lose safe harbors that conduits generally enjoy. ISPs may respond by separating their operations.)

Free Speech and the Myth of the Internet as an Unintermediated Experience
- Christopher Yoo, University of Pennsylvania
(Free speech has historically been furthered by granting editorial discretion. The exercise of similar discretion by intermediaries is inevitable, and helps free speech – so NN regulation doesn’t help speech.)

How to Determine Whether a Traffic Management Practice is Reasonable
- Scott Jordan, Arijit Ghosh: University of California, Irvine
(Provides an analytic structure for determining whether a traffic management practice is reasonable. The framework could allow ex ante guidelines/decisions to be made, instead of relegating decisions to case-by-case ex post analysis.)

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