Social Values in a Future Internet: Analyzing the Named Data Networking Protocols
Katie Shilton · 2013
The technical details of internet architecture affect social debates about privacy and autonomy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and the basic performance and reliability of Internet services. Networking engineers making technical choices also weigh social values (consciously or un-) when working on internet infrastructure. This paper reports on ongoing research examining the social values considered in the design of a future Internet architecture, referred to as Named Data Networking (NDN). The project seeks to understand how a network of actors, work practices and contexts contribute to the embedding of particular values in NDN. This paper describes the values expressed by the engineering team based on data gathered from publications and internal documents. It uses these documents to understand the salience of particular values to the project. Values central to NDN design include efficiency and dynamism, which are invoked in response to technical constraints and possibilities. Other central values, including privacy and anonymity, stem from a concern for personal liberties. More peripheral communitarian values espoused by the engineers include democratization and trust. This taxonomy of values embedded in the current NDN approach can help advocates for values in design as well as policy researchers understand the social challenges and values engendered by this emerging architecture. The paper uses this taxonomy to discuss the implications of these values for information access, public policy, and existing institutional power dynamics.