Neutral Net Neutrality: Expressing User Preferences With Network Cookies

Should applications receive special treatment from the network? And if so, who decides which applications are preferred?  This discussion, known as net neutrality, goes beyond technology and is a hot political topic, even making it to John Oliver's weekly show.  In this talk we will approach net neutrality from a user's perspective. Through user studies, we demonstrate that users do indeed want some services to receive preferential treatment; and their preferences have a heavy-tail: a one-size-fits-all approach (like T-Mobile's MusicFreedom or Facebook's FreeBasics programs) is unlikely to work. This suggests that users should be able to decide how their traffic is treated. A crucial part to enable user preferences, is the mechanism to express them. To this end, we developed present network cookies, a general mechanism to express user preferences to the network. During the talk we will discuss user preferences and network cookies through the lens of i) Boost, a user-defined fast lane deployed in 161 homes and now part of Google's OnHub home router, ii) a 1000-people survey on mobile data plans and zero-rating.

Speaker: Yiannis Yiakoumis, Stanford

Room 126