IETF77 Technical Plenary Information

[IAB Chair <[e-mail]>]

Dear colleagues,

The IETF 77 technical plenary is planned for Thursday and we hope to
welcome you between 1630-1930 in California C.

I addition to the IAB and IRTF chair reports we will host a technical
session titled "The Rapid Consolidation of Internet Content and
Privacy Diffusion". Our aim is to present the relevant works with a
focus on implications for protocol design and IETF-related work areas,
but also to generally inform the community on some measured and
observable trends. More information below.

After the Q&A on the technical keynote (moderated by Danny McPherson)
we will open up the microphone for the general technical open
microphone session.

To make this session slightly more efficient we would appreciate if
you would compose a mail with the topic you want to bring up during
the session and send that to the IAB. This allows the IAB to think a
few minutes about a comprehensive answer but also may help the person
asking the question to ask a succint question.

Obviously, the above is not obligatory but is considered a service to
those participating in the session.

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=  The Rapid Consolidation of Internet Content and Privacy Diffusion

 The last five years have seen a rapid consolidation of Internet
 content and traffic demands. Increasingly, we see a small number of
 large content companies and CDNs manage the majority of Internet traffic. 
 Similarly, just a small handful of data aggregators are able to track 
 movements of users on the Internet. In this pair of talks we explore the 
 engineering and privacy implications of such consolidation.

 The first talk (by Craig Labovitz, Arbor Networks) reports on a two year 
 study of more than 200 Exabytes of commercial Internet traffic through 
 110 large providers around the world. We show significant changes in 
 inter-AS traffic demands and an evolution of provider peering strategies.  
 Specifically, we find the majority of inter-domain traffic by volume 
 now flows directly between large content providers, data center/CDNs and 
 consumer networks. We conclude with estimates of the current size of the 
 Internet by inter-domain traffic volume and rate of annualized inter-domain
 traffic growth.

 The second talk (by Balachander Krishnamurthy, AT&T Labs--Research) examines 
 the leakage of privacy on the Internet: how information related to individual
 users is aggregated as they browse seemingly unrelated Web sites. Thousands 
 of Web sites across numerous categories, countries, and languages were 
 studied to generate a privacy "footprint". We report on a longitudinal study
 consisting of multiple snapshots of our examination of such diffusion over 
 six years. We examine the various technical ways by which third-party 
 aggregators acquire data and the depth of such user-related information.
 Our results show increasing aggregation of such data by a steadily 
 decreasing number of entities. A recent discovery of large-scale leakage of
 personally identifiable information (PII) via Online Social Networks (OSN)
 is also presented. Third-parties can link PII with user actions both within 
 OSN sites and elsewhere on non-OSN sites.


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--Olaf Kolkman
    IAB Chair