Network stacking considered harmful

Abstract

The most important challenge facing the future Internet is not technical, but is rather the need to justify placing trust in the technical solutions. Current network models suffer from limitations that result in practical deployments being too complex to reason about. The novel channel market model, based on composing networks by sharing channels through a flat market, offers a better opportunity for reasoning. The old language is still useful, and continues to make sense in the new model. Two design principles, the haggling principle and the composition principle, provide hints for discussing and designing networks in a channel market.