Back to the Future: Towards an Internet of People (IoP)

While the recent transition from the network-focused concept of Quality of Service (QoS) to the user-centric notion of Quality of Experience (QoE) has led to a fundamental rethinking of the concept of service quality in communication systems. In this position paper we argue for a much broader understanding of the underlying paradigm change, i.e. with respect to economic and business aspects as well as the perspecti-ve of cognitive and social sciences, thus contrasting the current hype around the Internet of Things (IoT) with our vision of (re-)emphasizing an "Internet of People (IoP)". In order to highlight some of the consequences, we will discuss convergence aspects of cyber-physical systems together with recent advances in QoE re-search, especially concerning the economics of user-perceived quality. For further illustration we will specifically touch upon some results from a fixed point model of QoE-aware charging, before finally focusing on the recently proposed novel concept of Experience Level Agreements (ELA) which is supposed to com-plement traditional Service Level Agreements (SLA) if it comes to selling QoE to the end user.