The End-to-End Argument and Application Design: The Role of Trust

Symposium: Rough Consensus and Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles into Internet Policy Debates, held at the University of Pennsylvania\u27s Center for Technology Innovation and Competition on May 6-7, 2010. Policy debates about the evolution of the Internet show varying degrees of understanding about the underlying technology. A fundamental principle of the design of the Internet, from the early 1980s, is the so-called end-to-end argument articulated in a seminal technical paper. Intended to provide guidance for what kind of capability is built into a network as opposed to the devices that use the network, the end-to-end argument has been invoked in discussions about freedom, neutrality, and other qualities that may be associated with the supply and use of the Internet and with related public policy. This Article builds on the technical discussions of end-to-end to address the design of applications that use the Internet. It explores the role of trust as a factor in decisions about the structure of applications and their interaction with the Internet as part of a larger system

A Comparative Look at Various Countries\u27 Legal Regimes Governing Automated Vehicles

News and commentary about automated vehicles (AVs) focus on how they look and appear to operate, along with the companies developing and testing them. Behind the scenes are legal regimes—laws, regulations, and implementing bodies of different kinds—that literally and figuratively provide the rules of the road for AVs. Legal regimes matter because public welfare hinges on aspects of AV design and operation. Legal regimes can provide gatekeeping for AV developers and operators seeking to use public roads, and they can allocate liability when something goes wrong. Guiding and complementing legal regimes is public policy. Policy documents such as articulations of national strategies are sometimes used to address issues related to legal regimes and to demonstrate a jurisdiction’s support for AV development. Building on its long history analyzing AV policy issues, RAND (with support of its Institute for Civil Justice) collaborated with the University of Michigan Law School’s Law and Mobility Program to study the nature of different AV legal regimes around the world. It selected countries known to be active in this domain. The research team reviewed and shared scholarly and gray literature (which is a type of scholarship produced by an entity in which commercial publications are not the primary focus, such as white papers from a government agency), and it also consulted experts in these regimes from the public and private sectors. Under the supervision of the Law and Mobility Fellow (a lawyer), law students collected and studied materials associated with country-specific legal regimes and drafted summaries guided by RAND’s enumeration of key factors. Availability of information about legal regimes varies—access to documentation, especially in English, is uneven, even for officials in different countries working collaboratively on these issues. That constrained availability is reflected in published legal comparisons, and it motivated the research team’s systematic research, which drew from materials in English and other languages. This article summarizes the makeup of AV legal regimes of Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. It highlights some key contrasts, which will be developed further as the project continues. It focuses on law and policy relating to highly to fully automated vehicles (SAE Levels 4 and 5). Although guided by a common set of topics for each country, each profile reflects the material available and the factors that differentiate national approaches. The remainder of this article introduces the legal regimes of the covered countries in turn. It then provides an overview of key points of comparison and outlines future work

Older Adults, New Mobility, and Automated Vehicles

58 pagesThe premise that autonomous vehicles will address older adults’ immobility is not a given. As argued in the Public Policy Institute’s publication Universal Mobility-as-a-Service, public- and private-sector actors need to come together to create a set of supportive circumstances that enable us to harness emerging technology for individual and societal benefit. This paper and associated framework lays out the myriad and interconnected factors that all stakeholders in this space should be thinking about so that the promise of autonomous vehicles and new shared-use mobility opportunities can be realized. The framework can be used as a checklist of design considerations for AV pilot testing, and it also may inform research and development programs. Moreover, it can provide an easy-to-consult reference for policymakers as they define roles and responsibilities among public- and privatesector actors whose actions can enable equitable access—or result in greater inequity. This research reveals a perennial flaw in our technology adoption process, at least in the mobility arena: the current default of designing for a broad clientele of mobile individuals is insufficient. The framework identified in this report is an important but only preliminary step to ensuring that the needs of harder-to-serve populations, such as frail older adults and people with mobility disabilities, are met. Additional, more tailored activity is needed. AARP looks forward to advancing this work

Architecture and economic policy

The Internet is a passion for network technologists and a puzzle for economists. Each discipline needs to understand more of the thinking of the other to advance, but achieving that goal has been slow and difficult. Four papers were developed to further interdisciplinary analysis in the context of the 1995 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. As explained below, it is hoped that this set of papers will advance telecommunications policy analysis by clarifying the nature of the Internet--in particular, the nature and implications of its architecture-- and by framing economic questions based on that characterization, providing a foundation for further research.