Standards for Major Internet Disruptors: Blockchain, Intents, and Related Paradigms

The six articles in this special section address major issues concerned with evolving standardization processes and underlying technologies in the context of Blockchain for different application domains, showing how distributed ledger technologies can be so disruptive that they can change the Internet as we know it. Software is envisioned to play an unprecedented dominant role in future communication paradigms, with user-defined applications capable of not only communicating with, but also controlling some features of the underlying communication infrastructure in a secure and trustworthy manner. This (r)evolutionary trend toward virtualized and “softwarized” networks enable Internet-based service users and providers, as well as the related stakeholders, to take advantage of resource abstractions and to adopt a programmatic approach to service deployment. In a “game-changing” scenario, a user’s needs can be decoupled and expressed independently of the specific underlying implementable technology, but yet the requested service must meet the expected mutual trustiness and security levels. This trend opens a number of disruptive solutions that can change the Internet as we know it.