As part of our NSF-funded network research project on modeling Internet interconnection dynamics, we hosted the second Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE2011) last December 1-2. The goal of the workshop was to bring together network technology and policy researchers with providers of commercial Internet facilities and services (network operators) to further explore the common objective of framing an agenda for the emerging but empirically stunted field of Internet infrastructure economics. The final report (http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2012/wie11_report/) attempts to capture the content, structure, and depth of the discussions, and presents relevant open research questions identified by workshop participants. From the intro (but the 5-page pdf is worth reading):

Building on the success of our first (virtual) Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE09), we expanded the scope and depth of the second workshop in this series, inviting experts in the following topics of interest: peering strategies and conflicts; content delivery; traffic and topology dynamics of the peering ecosystem; sustainable business models and industry structure. The workshop format was structured to promote constructive, focused engagement. Attendees presented research results, offered updates on data sources, moderated topic discussions, served as formal respondents to other speakers, and critiqued the relevance and potential impact of the presented results An intended goal was to establish a set of open questions that can frame an Internet economics research agenda, and more specifically to improve the realism, utility, and predictive power of economic models of Internet topology and dynamics. Even this expanded scope falls short of the recognized breadth of the emerging discipline of Internet economics; we plan to include other recurring issues and questions at the next workshop, including the economics of privacy, advertising, censorship, and intellectual property.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2012 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Commentaries, Economics, Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.