In their unrelenting quest for lower latency, cloud providers are deploying servers closer to their customers and enterprises are adopting paid Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offerings with performance guarantees. Unfortunately, these trends contribute to greater industry consolidation, benefiting larger companies and well-served regions while leaving little room for smaller cloud providers and enterprises to flourish. Instead, we argue that the public Internet could offer good enough performance if only edge networks could control wide-area routing.

Maria Apostolaki joined Princeton University as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in August 2022.