ties of deep packet inspection, used for
everything from security concerns to
managing traffic flow.
5
NDN will also change how governments assert regional jurisdiction on
the Internet. Today, IP addresses are
often used to target law enforcement
action.
15 Countermeasures to such
targeting in IP include content encryption, encapsulation, and use of third-party resources such as botnets. NDN
further disassociates communication
from location, as demonstrated by the
Io T scenario, which allows communication between devices without any
reference to physical geography. This
disassociation complicates the identification and geolocation of suspicious
activity based on network data. By
complicating the use of network data
for identification and geolocation,
NDN may encourage law enforcement
methods that are more effective, such
as following financial trails rather than
Internet traffic.
Digital rights management. Law en-
forcement personnel are not the only
stakeholders that rely on IP address
geolocation capabilities. Sports fran-
chises use them to restrict subscribers
in local markets from watching games
online. Gambling operations restrict
participation from countries in which
such operations are illegal. Search re-
sults are tailored to locations. Howev-
er, one level of indirection, such as Vir-
tual Private Networks (VPNs), can often
circumvent IP-address-based control.
In NDN, stakeholders might need to
rely on application-layer identity and
location information to enforce such
content restrictions. Although Inter-
ests can come from anywhere, stake-
holders could build systems of encryp-
tion and key distribution based on
location-verified subscribers.
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
typically involves controlling distri-
bution of content, and controlling
whether consumers can redistrib-
ute that content. NDN supports the
first kind of DRM well, but makes
republishing easier than it is with
IP. As in the IP Internet, copyright
holders can distribute verified, en-
crypted media, and consumers can
access the content with the proper
key. However, widespread encryp-
tion challenges the benefits of in-
network caching, reducing economic
incentives to provide such caching.
2
Reliance on encryption for copyright
enforcement also hinders legitimate
reuses of content, such as fair use in
educational contexts, critique, and
parody. Content producers might en-
able fair use by giving copies of keys
to libraries, or providing portions of
the content in the clear for scholar-
ship, critique, parody, or other pro-
tected fair uses. But once consumers
have received and decrypted verified
content, they may distribute unau-
thorized versions in the clear, a task
made easier by NDN.
NDN’s in-network storage and
caching means that many segments of
both licensed (presumably encrypted)
and unlicensed (presumably decrypted) media could reside on routers
and repos. A world where countless
copies proliferate across the Internet
challenges assumptions embedded in
copyright law, as well as the current
mechanisms of copyright enforcement, such as the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice.
19 On the IP Internet, videos are
commonly hosted by major providers such as YouTube or Hulu, which
Social and policy impacts of NDN for content producers, consumers, regulators, and network operators.
Free speech Privacy Control of content Network neutrality
Named, signed data
available from any node
willing to provide it
Improvement for content
producers and consumers:
can route data around
censorship attempts
Improvement for
content consumers:
surveillance of content
more difficult to achieve
Challenge for content
producers and regulators:
complicates geographic
content restrictions
Improvement for content
producers & consumers:
diversifies interests in tussle
over Internet resources
Challenge for network operators:
diversifies competition
Strong provenance
built on data signatures
and straightforward
key distribution
Improvement for content
producers and consumers:
increases trust in
provenance of speech
Challenge for content
producers:
may identify content
producers
Improvement for content
producers and regulators:
may help identify
infringing content
Challenge for content producers
and consumers: may enable
discrimination based on data
type or origin.
Improvement for network
operators: Increases
information available for
network strategies
Improvement for network
operators: Increases information
available for network strategies
Data persistence
via uniformly accessed,
pervasive storage
Improvement for content
producers and consumers:
data persists even when
subject to takedowns
Challenge for
content producers
and consumers:
may increase likelihood
of decryption by
unauthorized parties
Challenge for
content producers
and regulators:
complicates
content control
Improvement for content
producers and consumers:
diversifies interests in tussle
over Internet resources
Challenge for network operators:
Incentives for hosting
caching unclear1
Request/response
model of data exchange
Improvement for
content consumers:
ensures anonymity for
content seekers; can
route requests around
censorship attempts
Improvement for
content consumers:
ensures anonymity for
content seekers
Improvement for content
regulators: may suppress
requests by name
Improvement for
network operators:
can control traffic load
by controlling the number
of pending Interests