Vishal Misra of Columbia University

The issue of Network Neutrality has ignited considerable public debate recently. While the term and much of the discussion originated in the legal community, we started looking at it from an engineering and networking perspective a few years ago.  We employed the lens of cooperative game theory and a careful modeling of the Internet including the topology, peering relationships and protocols used on the Internet. Our primary conclusion is that Network Neutrality should be expressed in terms of how you treat competition, not in how you treat packets and we proposed a definition of Network Neutrality that expresses that.  We present some of our results including our prediction back in 2008 of a rise in paid  peering, (last year Netflix signed paid peering arrangements with all four of the top broadband providers in the US), the inadequacies of the  Network Neutrality regulation in the US and the recent regulations in India and Canada, where they are are consistent with our definition of Network Neutrality. 

Biography:

Vishal Misra is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, with a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering Department and as an IEEE Fellow. His research emphasis is on mathematical modeling of networking systems, bridging the gap between practice and analysis. He served as the Vice-Chair of the Computer Science  Department at Columbia University from 2009 to 2011, and in 2011 he spun out Infinio, a company in the area of datacenter storage. He is also credited with inventing live-microblogging at CricInfo, a company he co-founded while a graduate student at UMass Amherst, predating Twitter by 10 years. CricInfo was later acquired by ESPN and is still the world’s most popular sports portal.