Routing money, not packets: public lecture on Net Neutrality by Dr. Vishal Misra

The issue of Network Neutrality has ignited considerable public debate in the recent past. While the term and much of the discussion originated in the legal community, Dr. Vishal Misra started looking at it from an engineering and networking perspective a few years ago. We employed the lens of cooperative game theory and careful modeling of the Internet including the topology, peering relationships, and protocols used on the Internet.

Dr. Vishal Misra’s primary conclusion is that Network Neutrality should be expressed in terms of how you treat competition, not in in terms of how you treat packets. He has proposed a definition of Network Neutrality which expresses the same.

In this lecture, Dr. Vishal Misra will present some of the results of his work, including:

The prediction back in 2008 about the rise in paid peering (last year Netflix signed paid peering arrangements with all 4 of the top broadband providers in the US);
Negative impact of differential pricing on competition;
Inadequacies of the Network Neutrality regulation in the US;
Recent regulations in India and Canada, which are consistent with Misra’s definition of Network Neutrality.