"Anyone who designs a new enhancement for the Internet should analyze the tussles that it will trigger, and the tussles in the surrounding context, and consider how they can be managed to ensure that the enhancement succeeds. As noted above, a powerful force is the tussle of competition. Protocol design, by creating opportunities for competition, can impose a direction on evolution."

Well, duh... The IETF has been "engineering" social directions for decades. Today it is almost entirely under the control of the equipment vendors, and the protocols produced (which get worse every year) are mostly designed to protect vendor interests (this is at the expense of working properly). Its nice to have a paper to reference, though. There are some people in the IETF who still think they are doing academic work which exists in a social vacuum and this is something you can hit them over the head with.

As the Internet has [evolved], new requirements have emerged that suggest new design principles, and perhaps suggest that we revisit some old ones. This paper explores one important reality that surrounds the Internet today: different stakeholders that are part of the Internet milieu have interests that may be adverse to each other, and these parties each vie to favor their particular interests. We call this process "the tussle." Accommodating this tussle is crucial to the evolution of the network's technical architecture.