Ensuring Network Neutrality for Future Distributed Systems

Network Neutrality is essential for ensuring a level playing field for the development of new applications and services on the Internet. Laws and rules alone might not be enough to protect innovation, fair competition and consumer's freedom of choice online. The research community has the responsibility to propose solutions that reveal discriminatory traffic management mechanisms on the Internet. We present the potential risks of a non-neutral Internet, identify several open challenges for designing solutions that detect traffic differentiation, and propose a model that addresses such challenges by taking advantage of distributed systems technologies.