A Responsible Internet to Increase Trust in the Digital World

Cristian Hesselman,Roland Van Rijswijk-Deij,Janet Hui Xue,Paola Grosso,Joeri De Ruiter,Mattijs Jonker,Giovane C M Moura,Anna Sperotto,Ralph Holz,Fernando Kuipers,Cees De Laat,Aiko Pras

doi:10.1007/s10922-020-09564-7

Abstract

Policy makers in regions such as Europe are increasingly concerned about the trustworthiness and sovereignty of the foundations of their digital economy, because it often depends on systems operated or manufactured elsewhere. To help curb this problem, we propose the novel notion of a responsible Internet, which provides higher degrees of trust and sovereignty for critical service providers (e.g., power grids) and all kinds of other users by improving the transparency, accountability, and controllability of the Internet at the network-level. A responsible Internet accomplishes this through two new distributed and decentralized systems. The first is the Network Inspection Plane (NIP), which enables users to request measurement-based descriptions of the chains of network operators (e.g., ISPs and DNS and cloud providers) that handle their data flows or could potentially handle them, including the relationships between them and the properties of these operators. The second is the Network Control Plane (NCP), which allows users to specify how they expect the Internet infrastructure to handle their data (e.g., in terms of the security attributes that they expect chains of network operators to have) based on the insights they gained from the NIP. We discuss research directions and starting points to realize a responsible Internet by combining three currently largely disjoint research areas: large-scale measurements (for the NIP), open source-based programmable networks (for the NCP), and policy making (POL) based on the NIP and driving the NCP. We believe that a responsible Internet is the next stage in the evolution of the Internet and that the concept is useful for clean slate Internet systems as well.

Highlights

The Internet has evolved from a local network for a small group of experts in the early 1970s to a global, continuously evolving infrastructure that supports a wide range of services and products that almost all businesses, governments, and citizens depend on today, even more so after the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak.policy makers in regions such as Europe are increasingly concerned about the trustworthiness and sovereignty of the foundations of their digital economy [1,2,3], because it often depends on systems manufactured or operated elsewhere
We propose the novel notion of a responsible Internet, which aims to provide a higher degree of trust and sovereignty for critical service providers and all kinds of other users by making the Internet more transparent, accountable, and controllable at the network-level
Realizing a responsible Internet is an ambitious undertaking with a wide range of challenges lying ahead, as we have illustrated in this paper

Summary

Introduction

The Internet has evolved from a local network for a small group of experts in the early 1970s to a global, continuously evolving infrastructure that supports a wide range of services and products that almost all businesses, governments, and citizens depend on today, even more so after the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak.policy makers in regions such as Europe are increasingly concerned about the trustworthiness and sovereignty of the foundations of their digital economy [1,2,3], because it often depends on systems manufactured or operated elsewhere. The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) recently articulated their concerns about Europe’s “digital sovereignty” [3] They point out that the top 15 Internet companies in the world (e.g., Google, Facebook, and Alibaba) are either from the US or from China and not one of them from Europe. They highlight that European tech companies often get acquired by non-European companies (e.g., 53 were bought by US “tech titans” in 2011–2016). The risks they associate with these developments include European service providers and citizens losing control over their data and cybersecurity facilities, Europe no longer being able to meet their citizens’ norms and expectations, reduced competitive power, and drain of technical expertise [3]

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