expressing data origin, such as /edu/ ucla or /com/nytimes, may indicate institutional power or status. Signing keys may also reveal data origin. Future standards might use names or signing keys to prioritize particular interest/ data exchanges, such as emergency response traffic. Executing such pri-oritization across multiple providers would bear the same policy complexity and risk as with attempts to do multi-provider QoS on today’s IP networks. 11

In an NDN network, routing provides only one of the input factors for forwarding decisions; locally configured forwarding strategies make the final decision on which Interest is forwarded along which path, or forwarded at all. In this way, NDN’s inherent support for mobility and disruption-tolerant networking could mitigate the threat of harmful traffic discrimination. Even if prioritized networking evolves using semantically-meaningful names or pay-for-retention policies on routers, NDN’s ability to forward requests around providers that do not respond efficiently will give consumers more options for data transmission. Small ISPs can use multipath forwarding to choose forwarding paths based on performance measurements. NDN enables providers to route around ISPs that throttle traffic based on certain names, which will provide a disincentive for such throttling.

Conclusion

NDN brings some of the semantics of the current Internet’s application layers to the network layer, providing technical benefits to application developers, network operators, and end users. NDN’s architectural design decisions are also likely to have implications for social and policy issues in both layers, including some of today’s most pressing challenges: free speech, privacy, control of content, and network neutrality. Whether these impacts are benefits or drawbacks depends upon stakeholder perspective. The accompanying table maps NDN’s technical implications to social and policy impacts for a range of stakeholders: content producers, consumers, regulators, and network operators.

By diversifying the nodes that can provide data, NDN will likely improve conditions for free and anonymous speech and information seeking for consumers and producers. NDN’s respond to DMCA takedown notices.

However, even these major providers struggle with the scale: as of August 2015, Google was receiving over 12 million URLs requested to be removed from search per week. 20 Who would be responsible for taking down an infringing video distributed on thousands of routers by thousands of different organizations across the world? The political economy of repos—who owns them, and in what jurisdictions—will impact the future efficacy of such takedown notices. NDN’s in-network storage may increase pressure on lawmakers to redefine intellectual and political understandings of copyright already challenged by pervasive digital duplication.

Network neutrality: An uncertain outcome. The network neutrality debate focuses on what actors pay for Internet resources such as bandwidth and storage, and whether those actors providing resources (for example, ISPs) may throttle or privilege traffic to increase revenue. Consideration of NDN’s impact on network neutrality motivates a deeper discussion of NDN node operation. The algorithms and parameters for configuring network-forwarding policy for given data prefixes and links in NDN are typically referred to as strategies.f Strategies are an evolving part of NDN research. In every NDN device, strategies control the operation of three tables—the FIB, the Content Store, and the PIT. The strategies for these tables affect performance by enabling node owners to express traffic shaping policies in terms of namespaces and faces to other nodes.

Interest forwarding strategies. Routing
protocols and/or manual setup of stat-
ic routes are used to configure forward-
ing strategies in the FIB. The resulting
configuration expresses the policies of
router administrators, who may choose
to discriminate based on data types
(indicated within data names, for ex-
ample, /local/toaster) or namespace of
publication (ucla/cs/local/toaster). Such
traffic discrimination may occur in IP
f Here, we use strategies more broadly than the
NDN architects have so far, using this term to
cover any policy choice that can be made in an
NDN node that does not violate the “thin waist”
of the architecture as currently understood.
but at higher layers, for example, HTTP
or via the Domain Name System (DNS)
names. NDN routers will be capable of
such choices at the network layer.
Content store strategies. All data that
passes through an NDN router can be
cached in the content store, and per-
sists according to a router’s configured
caching policy. NDN spreads caching
and its costs across the Internet infra-
structure, which democratizes content
storage functions and introduces new
stakeholders into the tussle over Inter-
net resources. Researchers are consider-
ing economic incentives for deploying
caches and markets for cache participa-
tion. 2 In-network storage will also im-
pact the political economy of content
dissemination. Given enough in-net-
work caching, content producers on an
NDN Internet can use a cheap server
and low-bandwidth connection to make
their viral videos reachable by millions
of interested viewers, with the network
providing scalability to handle content
requests. Thus, NDN could reduce de-
pendence on third-party services to
scale content distribution. Users could
share content on their own terms, rath-
er than being subject to a third-party
provider or hosting service’s terms.
Pending interest table (PIT) strategies.
Because the PIT records which Interest
packets have been forwarded, and then
waits for data packets to return, policies
that modify how long to retain Interests
in the PIT could impact data retrieval
performance. (While a field in each In-
terest specifies a lifetime, it is up to each
forwarder to obey that field.) Whether
consumers or namespace providers are
able to influence the quality of service
through longer Interest storage in the
PIT, or more aggressive re-issuing of In-
terests across multiple outgoing faces,
are strategy configuration questions
that could impact a node’s neutrality.

Neutrality implications of NDN node strategies. The actors controlling NDN traffic routing decisions are likely to be more diverse than on an IP Internet. Nonetheless, an NDN-based Internet’s ISPs will continue to have incentives (if not obligations) to author strategy modules to manage the tables in their routers and prioritize data with certain types or names. Data names may reveal types of content, such as IoT, video, scientific data, or emergency response data. Globally routable name prefixes