Constantine Dovrolis Georgia Institute of Technology constantine@gatech

2. Constantine Dovrolis Georgia Institute of Technology constantine@gatech.edu

3. Outline • What is this workshop about? • The evolution of research ideas and industry transformations that led to this workshop • Workshop objectives

4. What is this workshop about? Background Tier-1 network Tier-1 network $$ Tier-1 network $$ Transit Provider Transit Provider $$ $$ $$ Enterprise customer Enterprise customer Content Provider Content Provider

5. What is this workshop about? • Internet as a network of networks (Autonomous Systems) • Subject of Networking research • Internet as a graph (AS-level graph) • Subject of Graph Theory research • Internet as a networked market • Subject of Economics research

6. But this workshop is also about • Real businesses, real money.. • Transit providers (Level3, Cogent, ..) • Access providers (Comcast, Verizon, ..) • Content providers (Google, Yandex, ..) • Content Distribution Networks (Akamai, ..) • Internet Exchange Points (Equinix, ..) • Regulatory bodies (e.g., FCC) and some hard policy questions • See Network Neutrality debate.. • Real people and their Internet experience

7. The evolution of ideas/events that led to this workshop: • Disclaimer: This is my own, biased view of this evolution

8. The prehistoric era of the Internet(till about 20 years ago..)

9. Topology modeling in the pre-historic era

10. Followed by the Internet commercialization transition in 1995

11. Early attempts to model Internet topology realistically (1996-7)

12. At about the same time, “Internet economics” started attracting attention Connectivity in the commercial Internet J Cremer, P Rey, J Tirole The Journal of Industrial Economics, 2000

13. A breakthrough in Internet topology modeling took place in 1999

14. Followed by a rich literature in graph theory and network science about scale-free graphs

15. But most of that work does not consider the various economic (and other) objectives that drive Internet connectivity Until the following paper in 2002..

16. This breakthrough created a strong connection between Internet topology models, economics and network formation games

17. At about the same time, the networking community started measuring and modeling the Internet as an evolving economic ecosystem

18. And while the research community was blending together networking, economics and graph theory, the industry was going through MAJOR transformations.. • Internet content originating mostly from CDNs • Global penetration of Internet Exchange Points • Reducing peering costs and simplifying interconnections • Internet densification and “flattening” • Massive drop in Internet transit prices (price war?) • Consolidation of Internet transit providers • Major disputes between Tier-1 transit providers (e.g., Level3 vs Cogent in 2005) • Major disputes between Access and Content providers/CDNs (e.g., Level3 vs Comcast in 2010) • Network neutrality debate: should ISPs charge differently depending on content? Should they charge content providers?

19. Bill Norton’s book/papers describe these transformations very clearly

20. What does this all mean?Workshop Objectives • The ground is ready for some truly cross-disciplinary work in the area of Internet Economics • Bring together Networking, Economics, Network Science • Real potential for major impact that can affect • Two-three billions of users? • Thousands of Internet-related companies? • Plus, some new and interesting problems in each of the previous disciplines • Fertile ground to develop completely new methods?

21. A final note: How to avoid the “confusion of languages”? • Our languages are very different: • Economics, networking, theoretical CS, graph theory • Can we communicate somehow? • If we manage to communicate, the result can be larger than the sum of its parts