Archive for April, 2008

top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #7

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 by kc

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#7: The traditional mode of getting data from public infrastructures to inform policymaking — regulating its collection — is a quixotic path, since the government regulatory agencies have as much reason to be reluctant as providers regarding disclosure of how the Internet is engineered, used, and financed.

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top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #6

Monday, April 21st, 2008 by kc

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#6: While the looming problems of the Internet indicate the need for a closer objective look, a growing number of segments of society have network measurement access to, and use, private network information on individuals for purposes we might not approve of if we knew how the data was being used.

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top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #5

Sunday, April 20th, 2008 by kc

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#5: Thus the research community is in the absurd situation of not being able to do the most basic network research even on the networks established explicily to support academic network research.

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top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #4

Saturday, April 19th, 2008 by kc

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#4: The data dearth is not a new problem in the field; many public and private sector efforts have tried and failed to solve it.

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top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #3

Friday, April 18th, 2008 by kc

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#3: Despite the methodological limitations of Internet science today, the few data points available suggest a dire picture:

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top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #2

Thursday, April 17th, 2008 by kc

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#2: Our scientific knowledge about the Internet is weak, and the obstacles to progress are primarily issues of economics, ownership, and trust (EOT), rather than technical.

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top ten things lawyers should know about the Internet: #1

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 by kc

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[Originally written as a series of blog entries, this document was later converted to a booklet/pamphlet, see  “Top Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet“]

last year Kevin Werbach invited me to his Supernova 2007 conference to give a 15-minute vignette on the challenge of getting empirical data to inform telecom policy. They posted the video of my talk last year, and my favorite tech podcast ITConversations, posted the mp3 as an episode last week. i clearly needed more than 15 minutes.

in response to my “impassioned plea”, i was invited to attend a meeting in March 2008 hosted by Google and Stanford Law School — Legal Futures — a “conversation between some of the world’s leading thinkers about the future of privacy, intellectual property, competition, innovation, globalization, and other areas of the law undergoing rapid change due to technological advancement.” there i had 5 minutes to convey the most important data points I knew about the Internet to lawyers thinking about how to update legal frameworks to best accommodate information technologies in the 21st century. Google will be posting the talks from this meeting too, but since I probably left even more out at that meeting, I will post my top ten list of the most important things we need lawyers to understand about the Internet..one per day for the next ten days.

#1: updating legal frameworks to accomodate technological advancement requires first updating other legal frameworks to accommodate empirically grounded research into what we have built, how it is used, and what it costs to sustain.

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