Moving towards a socially-driven internet architectural design

Sofia, R., Mendes, P., Damásio, M. J., Henriques, S., Giglietto, F., Giambitto, E., & Bogliolo, A. (2012). Moving towards a socially-driven internet architectural design. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. https://doi.org/10.1145/2317307.2317316

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Summary

This position paper argues that Internet architectural design should evolve from a purely technological discipline into an interdisciplinary practice that treats social capital as a first-class design concern. The authors trace the user’s evolution from consumer to prosumer, and further to a “network prosumer” whose participatory behaviour extends into lower OSI layers through User-centric Networks (UCNs). They diagnose the current 7-stage Internet supply chain as asymmetric — some stages profit from traffic growth while others stagnate — and contend that accommodating prosumers requires a symmetric supply chain and networking metrics grounded in reach, engagement, influence, and trust. A comparative reading of centrality concepts across networking and social capital theory highlights specific conceptual misalignments that a socially-driven redesign must resolve.

Key Contributions

• Articulates a vision for a socially-driven Internet architecture that fuses social capital theory with networking design.
• Extends prosumerism into the network layer via the “network prosumer” concept, grounded in User-centric Networks.
• Proposes a symmetric variant of the 7-stage Internet supply chain that explicitly includes prosumers and UCNs.
• Provides a comparative mapping between social capital and networking notions of centrality (degree, betweenness, closeness), identifying misalignments.
• Identifies reach, engagement, and influence as the most actionable social properties for operationalization, with candidate networking metrics for each.

Methods

Conceptual, interdisciplinary position paper. The authors draw on literature from computer networking (GENI, EIFFEL, SocialNets, ULOOP), social capital theory (Bourdieu, Coleman, Putnam, Burt), communication studies, and economics. Their analytical scaffolding combines Pigliapoco and Bogliolo’s 7-stage Internet supply chain, a comparative table of centrality definitions, and a proposed socially-driven design cycle linking social media, open datasets, behavioural models, and new business practices.

Findings

• Operator vertical integration conflicts with the modular TCP/IP stack, throttling innovation and misaligning costs with price models.
• Supply-chain stages 2, 3, 5, and 7 have benefited from traffic growth; stages 1, 4, and 6 have stagnated due to weak price signals.
• UCNs rest on four properties — resource sharing, cooperation, trust, and self-organization — that push prosumer behaviour to lower OSI layers.
• Centrality is interpreted differently across domains: high-betweenness nodes are social “bridgers” but treated as mere relays in networking; high-closeness nodes imply diffusion socially yet often become bottlenecks in networks.
• The bridger role and the transitivity of strong ties are underrepresented in current pervasive networking models.
• Prosumer activity on the Internet displays power-law characteristics, evidencing coexistence of consumer and prosumer modes.
• Social capital operates at both individual and collective levels, with trust and reciprocity central in Putnam’s framing.

Connections

No related papers have been supplied under shared topics, so no wikilinks are made here. Conceptually, the paper sits alongside work on User-centric Networks, Future Internet initiatives such as GENI and EIFFEL, and social capital scholarship in the Bourdieu–Coleman–Putnam lineage — connections that would need to be made explicit once neighbouring notes exist.