Dirk Kutscher

Our ACM CoNEXT-2024 workshop on the decentralization of the Internet on Monday, December 9th 2024 in LA has an exciting agenda – don't miss it! Check out the workshop homepage for up-to-date information.

09:00 Session 1: Keynotes

1. Keynote by Cory Doctorow: DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How computer scientists can halt enshittification to make a new, good internet and condemn today's enshitternet to the scrapheap of history.
2. Keynote by Michael Karanicolas: The Fediverse Papers: Constitutional, Governance, and Policy Questions for a New Paradigm of Networking

11:00 Session 2: Decentralized Systems

1. Martin Kleppmann, et al.; Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
2. Benjamin Schichtholz et al.; ReP2P Matrix: Decentralized Relays to Improve Reliability and Performance of Peer-to-Peer Matrix
3. Tianyuan Yu et al.; On Empowering End Users in Future Networking

14:00 Session 3: Technologies for Decentralization

1. Huaixi Lu et al.; Atomicity and Abstraction for Multi-Blockchain Interactions
2. David Guzman et. el; Communication Cost for Permissionless Distributed Consensus at Internet Scale
3. Yekta Kocaogullar et al.; Towards a Decentralized Internet Namespace

15:00 Session 4: Decentralization of the Internet – Quo Vadis?

• Organizers: Lixia Zhang & Dirk Kutscher
• Interactive panel discussion with Cory Doctorow, Michael Karanicola, and paper authors

The IRTF DINRG Meeting at IETF-121 takes place on 2024-11-06 at 13:00 to 14:30 UTC.

• Presentations in the IETF datatracker
• MeetEcho
• Onsite tool
• Notes
• DINRG Wiki
• IETF-121 Agenda

Documents and Links to Resources

1. United We Stand: Collaborative Detection and Mitigation of
   Amplification DDoS Attacks at
   Scale
2. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy/
3. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcfadden-cnsldtn-effects/

Notes

Please remember that all sessions are being recorded.

DE-CIX and EWE TEL opened the new Nordwest-IX Internet exchange point in Oldenburg, Germany on 2024-08-15.

DE-CIX, the largest Internet Exchange in Europe and the second-largest in the world, has eight locations in Germany now: Oldenburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich, Ruhr region. They have recently begun to decentralize their IXPs in Germany by opening new IXPs in addition to their main location in Frankfurt.

Can IXPs help with Internet Decentralization?

In the IRTF Research Group on the Decentralization of the Internet (DINRG), we are investigating root causes for and potential counter-measures against Internet Centralization. There are two aspects for centralization/decentralization and IXPs:

1. Internet peering happens mostly at public IXPs, locally centralized exchange points in an otherwise logically decentralized network of Autonomous Systems. Big application service providers ("hyperscalers") are also engaging in so-called "Direct Peering" (or "Private Peering") where they connect their network directly to, typically, Internet Service Providers that provide Internet access and can benefit from a direct connection to dominant content/service providers. Often, it is the hyperscaler who benefits most in terms of cost saving. Decentralizing IXPs can provide incentives for such networks to connect at IXPs instead of doing direct peering, which is often seen as beneficial as it increases connectivity options and it reduces cost and latency.
2. IP connectivity alone is not a sufficient condition for low latency and decentralization though, as most hyperscaler applications rely on some form of CDN overlay network. Even with potential local IP forwarding, CDN proxies may be hosted at central locations. To counter that, it is important to create co-location and local edge service hosting opportunities at or closed to IXPs, which can be a business opportunity for the connected ISPs, such we EWE TEL for Nordwest-IX.

The Internet is evolving, and new technologies might change the role of overlays in the future. For example, technologies such as Media-over-QUIC (MoQ) might lead to massive caching and replication overlay structures that will or will not be shared across applications and hyperscalers. IXPs and co-location data centers can be natural places for operating MoQ relays.

We have an exciting agenda for our upcoming IRTF DINRG meeting (Wednesday, July 24th, 2024 at 09:30 in Vancouver) at IETF-120. If you do not attend the IETF-120 meeting locally, please consider attending online.

Documents and Links to Resources

• Policy Network on Internet
  Fragmentation
• https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dance-architecture/06/
• https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9518/
• SOLID Project

Panel Description

Internet Decentralization – Next Steps

The previous DINRG meetings all had lively open mic discussions. However we noticed that those spontaneous conversations, while being interesting and insightful, tend to head to different issues in diverse directions. At this meeting we will continue/extend the previous discussions by gathering a small group of panelists and start the discussion with a list of questions collected from the previous meetings. We will have an open mic for all audience and share the list of discussion questions on DINRG list before the meeting; by gathering a panel and preparing a list of questions, we hope to make the discussions more effective and fruitful, moving towards our overarching goal of identifying an ordered list of issues that DINRG aims to address in coming years.

Links

• DINRG Presentations in the IETF
  datatracker
• MeetEcho
• Onsite
  tool
• Notes
• DINRG Wiki
• IETF-120 Agenda

Sponsors

Recent years have witnessed the consolidation and centralization of the Internet applications, services, as well as the infrastructure. This centralization has economic aspects and factors as well as technical ones. The effects are often characterized as detrimental to the original goals of the Internet, such as permissionless innovation, as well as to society at large, due to the amount of (personal) data that is obtained and capitalized on by large platforms.

We are organizing a workshop at ACM CoNEXT-2024 to provide a forum for academic researchers to present and discuss on-going work on this topic and to create greater awareness in the larger community for this topic. The workshop would solicit work on specific topics including but not limited to:

• investigation of the root causes of Internet centralization, and articulation of the impacts of the market economy, architecture and protocol designs, as well as government regulations;
• measurement of the Internet centralization and the consequential societal impacts;
• characterization and assessment of observed Internet centralization;
• new research topics and technical solutions for decentralized system and application development;
• decentralized (cloud-independent) distributed system design;
• protocols and algorithms for decentralized distributed systems; and
• decentralized security and trust architectures and protocols for real-world Internet systems.

Submission Instructions

Please see the workshop homepage for details.