Democratizing Content

Michael J. Freedman recently gave a talk on "Democratizing Content Distribution" at the Duke Computer Science Department Colloquium. The work that Michael is doing is relevant to several of my earlier postings - including the ones around metaverse scalability, metaverse economics, and the problems associated with centralized control of large scale information systems. Here is the somewhat academese abstract of his talk:

In order to reach their large audiences, today's Internet publishers primarily use content distribution networks (CDNs) to deliver content. Yet the architectures of the prevalent commercial systems are tightly bound to centralized control, static deployments, and trusted infrastructure, thus inherently limiting their scope to ensure cost recovery. This talk describes a number of techniques (and the resulting systems) that realize highly-scalable cooperative content distribution. I show how to build a fully self-organizing CDN that efficiently delivers content using unreliable nodes, describe how to transparently dispatch clients to nearby servers, and touch on how to securely leverage even untrusted resources. These ideas have been implemented, deployed, and tested in production systems currently serving several terabytes of data to more than a million people every day. The view of the Internet gained from deploying these systems answered long-standing questions about network configuration, while providing important insights that helped evolve our systems' designs.

Michael is presently a doctoral student at NYU, visiting Stanford since 2005. He received his M.Eng. and S.B. degrees from MIT. His research interests span distributed systems, security, networking, and cryptography, with a focus on both principled designs and real deployments.