Internet Engineering Task Force J. Arkko
Internet-Draft Ericsson
Intended status: Informational B. Trammell
Expires: April 26, 2019 ETH Zurich
M. Nottingham
C. Huitema
Private Octopus Inc.
M. Thomson
Mozilla
J. Tantsura
Nuage Networks
October 23, 2018
Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet Architecture
draft-arkko-iab-internet-consolidation-00
Abstract
Many of us have held a vision of the Internet as the ultimate
distributed platform that allows communication, the provision of
services, and competition from any corner of the world. But as the
Internet has matured, it seems to also feed the creation of large,
centralised entities in many areas. This phenomenon could be looked
at from many different angles, but this memo considers the topic from
the perspective of how available technology and Internet architecture
drives different market directions.
Status of This Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on April 26, 2019.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. Data- and Capital-intensive Services . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.3. Permissionless Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.4. Fundamentals of Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.5. Technology Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1. Introduction
Many of us have held a vision of the Internet as the ultimate
distributed platform that allows communication, the provision of
services, and competition from any corner of the world. But as the
Internet has matured, it seems to also feed the creation of large,
centralised entities in many areas.
Is Internet traffic consolidating, i.e., moving towards a larger
fraction of traffic involving a small set of large content providers
or social networks? It certainly appears so, though more
quantitative research on this topic would be welcome.
This phenomenon could be looked at from many different angles, but
this memo considers the topic from the perspective of how available
technology and Internet architecture drives different market
directions. How are technology choices and fundamentals of
communication affecting some of these trends?
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Our engineering remit is to focus on technology, but of course we
also want to understand the implications and externalities of the
technical arrangements we design. Technology affects economics and
vice versa. The Internet technology community continues to make
decisions that have ramifications on Internet systems, just as we are
subject to forces that affect them.
As technologists, one question we have is whether there are changes
in technology that would help reduce technically-driven large-player
advantages.
This memo reviews areas where consolidation may be occurring in the
Internet, and discusses the potential reasons for this. Section 2
discusses consolidation and the reasons behind the creation of larger
entities, and Section 3 looks at some actions that might alleviate
the situation.
Note: If you are interested on this or other architecture-related
topics, please subscribe to the IAB architecture-discuss mailing list
as one forum for discussion.
2. Consolidation
Consolidation is driven by economic factors relating to scale and
ability to reach a large market over the Internet. In general, an
efficient market such as the Internet tends to enable winners to take
large market shares.
The most visible aspects of this involve well-recognised Internet
services, but it is important to recognise that the Internet is a
complex ecosystem. There are many underlying services whose
diversity, or lack thereof, are as important as that of, say,
consumer-visible social networks. For instance, the diversity of
cloud services, operating systems, browser engines is as important as
that as of application stores or the browsers themselves.
Of course, the Internet allows plenty of choice both in these and
other areas. Too many or too few choices create different kinds of
problems.
It would be useful to break these general factors and observations
down a bit further. In particular, it is useful to distinguish
market or economic factors from technical factors.
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2.1. Economics
Scaling benefits are natural for many types of businesses. And many
Internet-based businesses can potentially serve a very large customer
base, as the cost of replicating and delivering their service to new
customers or areas is small.
However, typically the network effect has an even more pronounced
impact. Each additional user adds to the value of the network for
all users in a network. In some applications, such as the open web,
this value grows for everyone, as the web is a globally connected,
interoperable service for anyone with a browser can use.
There is an important distinction between different applications of
the network effect, however. Consider email as another example;
anyone with an account at any email server can use it globally.
However, here we have seen much more consolidation into few large
email providers, both due to innovative, high-quality services but
also because running email services by small entities is becoming
difficult; among other things due to spam prevention practices that
tend to recognise well only the largest entities.
In some other applications, such as social media, the services have a
more closed nature. The value of being a customer of one social
media service depends highly on how many other customers that
particular service has. Hence, the larger the service, the more
valuable it is. And the bigger the value difference to the
customers, the less practical choice they have in selecting a
service.
In some cases, these developments also allow asymmetric relationships
to form, with the customers having less ability to affect the service
than they would perhaps wish.
2.2. Data- and Capital-intensive Services
The scaling advantages are only getting larger with the advent of AI-
and machine learning -based technologies.
The more users a service has, the more data is available for training
machine learning models, and the better the service becomes, bringing
again more users. This feedback loop and the general capital-
intensive nature of the technology (data and processing at scale)
makes it likely that the largest companies are ahead in the use of
these technologies.
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2.3. Permissionless Innovation
The email vs. social media example also highlights the interesting
roles of interoperability and the "permissionless innovation"
principle -- the idea that a network can be simple but still powerful
enough that essentially any application could be built on top of it
without needing any special support from anyone else. Permissionless
innovation has brought us all the innovative applications that we
enjoy today, on top of a highly interoperable underlying network,
along with advances in video coding and other techniques used by
applications.
Paradoxically, if the underlying network is sufficiently powerful,
the applications on top can evolve without similar pressures for
interoperability, leading to the closed but highly valuable services
discussed above. We call this the Permissionless Completeness
Problem.
2.4. Fundamentals of Communication
There are also fundamental issues. For instance, speed of light;
low-latency services can fundamentally only be provided through
globally distributed data centers. These are often provided built by
large organisations, although collaborative and data center or cloud
computing service approaches also exist.
A similar issue has arisen in recent years around large-scale denial-
of-service attacks, and how various entities can deal with them.
While the largest attacks affect all players (see, for instance, the
Dyn attacks in October 2016), it is also true that large cloud- and
content delivery providers can better deal with such attacks due to
their scale. This is one reason that attracts many network services
to such providers.
2.5. Technology Factors
One of the key questions is whether we are seeing developments that
are driven by economic factors or whether fundamental reasons or lack
available technology drives particular models. For instance,
centralised solutions might desirable due to business incentives, or
they might be necessary because there is no distributed,
collaborative solution.
For instance, some technical issues have historically not been easy
to solve, such as e-mail spam, which has lead to reliance on non-
technical solutions. Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to
run your own mail services, essentially forcing many organisations
and individuals to employ larger providers. The issues relate
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directly to size of entities; no one can afford to disconnect from
the largest providers. But as a small entity, there is little
leverage to convince peer entities or various supporting white/
blacklist entities to deal with you properly.
Many Internet services are based on gathering data about users, and
using that data for, for instance, targeted advertisements. More
data from more users makes it possible to run a service more
accurately or with better results; here again scale brings
advantages.
Another trend is that more and more content is becoming available
locally, from a content delivery or provider function directly on
your own ISP's network. We predict that eventually most content will
be delivered this way, reducing the role that global IP connections
across the Internet play. By some metrics this has already happened;
what practical - positive or negative - impacts might this have on
the Internet technology?
There are also security tradeoffs. Large entities are generally
better equipped to move to more recent and more secure technology.
For instance, the Domain Name System (DNS) shows signs of ageing but
due to the legacy of deployed systems, has changed very slowly.
Newer technology developed at the IETF enables DNS queries to be
performed confidentially, but its deployment is happening mostly in
browsers that use global DNS resolver services, such as Cloudflare's
1.1.1.1 or Google's 8.8.8.8. This results in faster evolution and
better security for end users.
However, if one steps back and considers the overall security effects
of these developments, the resulting effects can be different. While
the security of the actual protocol exchanges improves with the
introduction of this new technology, at the same time this implies a
move from using a worldwide distributed set of DNS resolvers into,
again, more centralised global resolvers. While these resolvers are
very well maintained (and a great service), they are potentially
high-value targets for pervasive monitoring and Denial-of-Service
(DoS) attacks. In 2016, for example, DoS attacks were launched
against Dyn, one of the largest DNS providers, leading to some
outages.
3. Action
Are there assumptions about the Internet architecture that no longer
hold in a world where larger, more centralised entities provide big
parts of the Internet service? If the world changes, the Internet
and its technology/architecture may have to match those changes.
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It appears that level the playing field for new entrants or small
players brings potential benefits. Are there technical solutions
that are missing today?
Of course, it may well be that technology improvements are hard to
come by. Nevertheless, recognising the risks of consolidation in
both current and proposed future technologies is the first step in
proactively avoiding those risks where possible.
Assuming that one does not wish for regulation, technologies that
support distributed architectures, open source implementations of
currently centralised network functions, or help increase user's
control can be beneficial. Federation, for example, would help
enable distributed services in situations where smaller entities
would like to collaborate.
Similarly, in an asymmetric power balance between users and services,
tools that enable the user to control what information is provided to
a particular service can be very helpful. Some such tools exist, for
instance, in the privacy and tracking-prevention modes of popular
browsers but why are these modes not the default, and could we
develop them further?
It is also surprising that in the age of software-defined everything,
we can program almost anything else except the globally provided,
packaged services. Opening up interfaces would allow the building of
additional, innovative services, and better match with users' needs.
Silver bullets are rare, of course. Internet service markets
sometimes fragment rather than cooperate through federation. And the
asymmetric power balances are easiest changed with data that is in
your control, but it is much harder to change when someone else holds
it. Nevertheless, the exploration of solutions to ensure the
Internet is kept open for new innovations and in the control of users
is very important.
What IETF topics that should be pursued to address some of the issues
around consolidation?
What measurements relating to the developments centralization or
consolidation should be pursued?
What research -- such as distributed Internet architectures -- should
be driven forward?
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4. Contributors
Much of the text in this memo is from a blog article written by Jari
Arkko, Mark Nottingham, Christian Huitema, Martin Thomson, and Brian
Trammell for the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and from a blog
article written by Jari Arkko and Brian Trammell APNIC and RIPE.
5. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank IAB members, Geoff Huston, Gonzalo
Camarillo, Mirjam Kuehne, Robert Mitchell, Olaf Kolkman, and many
others for interesting discussions in this problem space.
6. Informative References
[RFC1958] Carpenter, B., Ed., "Architectural Principles of the
Internet", RFC 1958, DOI 10.17487/RFC1958, June 1996,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1958>.
Authors' Addresses
Jari Arkko
Ericsson
Kauniainen 02700
Finland
Email: jari.arkko@piuha.net
Brian Trammell
ETH Zurich
Email: ietf@trammell.ch
Mark Nottingham
Email: mnot@mnot.net
Christian Huitema
Private Octopus Inc.
Email: huitema@huitema.net
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Martin Thomson
Mozilla
Email: martin.thomson@gmail.com
Jeff Tantsura
Nuage Networks
Email: jefftant.ietf@gmail.com
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