Subject: Re: [Privsec-discuss] [Stackevo] Consolidation

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2017 04:59:07 -0500

Hi, Jari,

One point, that you didn't ask for feedback about ...

On Sep 29, 2017 05:00, "Jari Arkko" <[email-masked]> wrote:

In the summer, the IAB briefly discussed the consolidation trends around
the Internet. Consolidation may take many different forms, for instance in
terms of traffic flows becoming more focused on large content providers;
consolidation in the ISP industry; drive towards fewer but more popular
operating systems or platforms; consolidation in the DNS or CDN industry;
dominance of popular applications and types of accounts users have; limited
sources for applications; and so on.

We all probably recognise at least some forms of these trends. In general,
some of these changes are a part of the Internet becoming globally
commercial, the best solutions winning market share. But there are of
course some concerns as well, starting from the effect few monocultures may
have on security issues. Or to ensure openness, and the ability to ensure
that innovation continues to generate new, better approaches in the
Internet.

But it is worth distinguishing architecural issues from marketplace
problems. Obviously, much of this space is outside the scope of the IAB and
more in the area of competition policies and economics. But there may be
questions for the IAB as well, whether there’s something that we should
understand better, or perhaps document.

I would have agreed with what you said here before the IRTF added GAIA and
HRPC, but given that those topics are now in scope for the IRTF that you
folks on the IAB have oversight responsibility for, "competition policies
and economics" doesn't seem as far out of scope to me now as it would have
three years ago.

That observation may not make any difference for your current investigation
on the three questions you asked about, and could be either wrong or
premature, but I thought it was reasonable to say that now.

For instance, many of the moves towards consolidation are driven by
economic factors rather than technical factors, but that it may be worth
studying to see if there are any assumptions about the architecture of the
Internet that no longer hold true. Similarly, there might be research
questions about the state of the Internet that the research community
should pay more attention to. For instance, research on Internet traffic
flows and how those change wrt their diversity and/or concentration over
time. As an example, is there a more recent version of what we saw in 2010
at the IETF 77 plenary: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/77/slides/
plenaryt-4.pdf?

So, do the folks in the different programs have advice to the IAB in this
topic? In particular:
1. Do you see architectural issues within your own field that relates to
consolidation trends, and how those affect the Internet?

It might be worth noting that our increased reliance on user-space
transport protocols may be taking us in the opposite direction from the
trends toward consolidation elsewhere for the internet.

One doesn't have to control kernel TCP and SCRAP implementations for hosts
with a large deployment footprint to make the Internet behave differently.
See QUIC for a soon-to-be worked example (not the current chartered NewReno
direction, but the first alternative congestion control scheme, which won't
surprise me at all when it comes out) :-)

2. What potential new architectural structures might provide support to
either fighting the consolidation trend, or accelerating it?

3. Are there research programs that you believe would be useful in this
space, but are currently not being pursued? Which ones?

Perhaps, but see my note about "competition policies and economics" above.

Spencer

Jari Arkko for the IAB

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2017 12:59:42 +0200

Hi Jari,

On 9/29/17 12:00 PM, Jari Arkko wrote:
>
> So, do the folks in the different programs have advice to the IAB in
> this topic? In particular:
>
> 1. Do you see architectural issues within your own field that relates
> to consolidation trends, and how those affect the Internet?

In the context of where I'm working (IoT security), every chip
manufacturer has their own platform/SOC, for instance, and add to that a
few operating systems and a few extra frameworks on top of them, and,
well, I'd say there's a consolidation somewhere in the future.  We are
seeing some market consolidation, but it hasn't caused a technology
consolidation (yet).

>
> 2. What potential new architectural structures might provide support
> to either fighting the consolidation trend, or accelerating it?

The notion of trusted introduction is well established in PKI.  However,
what it means in the context of IoT is challenging.  For instance: RFCs
7252 and 7925 make an implicit (?) assumption of access to the DNS when
domain names are used.  That resolution mechanism may not be appropriate
in all circumstances.  Perhaps ENAME will consider this aspect a bit.

>
> 3. Are there research programs that you believe would be useful in
> this space, but are currently not being pursued? Which ones?

Nope.  T2TRG is a hopping party!

Eliot

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2017 13:21:22 +0200

Good points, Spencer. Thanks.

(Although for competition issues and policies, we can be interested in this, and their effects, and research on the matter, but I’d guess without asking a lawyer that there’s a limit how far we should go in that space. Particularly for those of us who participate in the market as commercial actors ourselves.)

Jari

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2017 13:22:56 +0200

Good points from you Eliot as well, thanks again.

> T2TRG is a hopping party!

:-)

Jari

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From: "Aaron Falk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2017 17:53:22 -0400

Thanks for a provocative question!

On 29 Sep 2017, at 6:00, Jari Arkko wrote:

> 1\. Do you see architectural issues within your own field that relates 

I’ll noodle on this but a question that comes to mind is since the 
Internet has consolidated nearly all other (public) data networks, I 
wonder how hard it would be to restore the major distributed systems 
services (e.g., electrical, BGP, DNS) service if some major subset of 
the network was unexpectedly brought offline.  I worry we have hidden 
dependencies and the only way to expose them is to test a large scale 
reboot.

> 2\. What potential new architectural structures might provide support 

When I started at Akamai I was stunned at the volume of traffic 
generated by CDN servers as proxies for the major global content 
providers and the trend has continued.  The large CDN footprint has 
found additional utility expanding the attach surface for clients.  I 
believe both of these have been good for creating a sense of 
dependability and high performance in the minds of many Internet users 
and is a good thing.  I wonder if the idea of large scale (commercial) 
proxies can be extended elsewhere.

>
> 3\. Are there research programs that you believe would be useful in 

Thinking…

—aaron

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From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2017 12:16:11 -0400

Not sure which list we're using for this discussion, but maybe it
should be on one list :)  Anyway,

On Mon, Oct 02, 2017 at 05:53:22PM -0400, Aaron Falk wrote:

> it would be to restore the major distributed systems services (e.g.,
> electrical, BGP, DNS) service if some major subset of the network was
> unexpectedly brought offline.

One of the things that was clear at least by October 2016 is that the
architectural assumptions for the DNS include distributed operation;
but actual DNS operations for large web properties at least are
concentrated in just a few providers.  The resilience story for the
Internet is accordingly quite a bit worse than it ought to be.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]