New Design Principles for the Internet

Socio-economic aspects are not intrinsic to the current Internet architecture. Today's architecture is becoming stressed as stakeholders introduce "hacks" to try to impose their economic desires on others, leading to a "tussle" of conflicting interests. In this paper, we propose new Internet design principles that are "designed for tussle". We believe that Internet protocols and architecture that follow them will naturally integrate both technical and socio-economic aspects, and so will be able to smoothly adapt to changes in society's demands on the Internet as they occur, without requiring permanent redesign.