LCD-Net

Abstract

"The Internet is for everyone" claims Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet via RFC 3271. The Internet Society's recent global Internet survey reveals that the Internet should be considered as a basic human birth right. We strongly agree with these and believe that basic access to the Internet should be made free, at least to access the essential services. However the current Internet access model, which is governed by market economics makes it practically infeasible for enabling universal access especially for those with socio-economic barriers. We see enabling benevolence in the Internet (act of sharing resources) as a potential solution to solve the problem of digital exclusion caused due to socio-economic barriers. In this paper, we propose LCD-Net: Lowest Cost Denominator Networking, a new Internet paradigm that architects multi-layer resource pooling Internet technologies to support benevolence in the Internet. LCD-Net proposes to bring together several existing resource pooling Internet technologies to ensure that users and network operators who share their resources are not affected and at the same time are incentivised for sharing. The paper also emphasizes the need to identify and extend the stakeholder value chain to ensure such benevolent access to the Internet is sustainable.