Today I participated as a panelist in the Internet Regulation 2020 hosted by Duke Law’s Center for Innovation Policy at the National Academy of Sciences. The questions for my panel were:

What are the most significant realistic changes in network architecture, capacity, and connectivity by 2020? In what ways might these developments be affected, perhaps even precluded, by regulatory policy? In what ways might these developments in turn affect regulatory policy? What are the costs and benefits of these developments and their possible regulation?

My slides (which link to related reading on last slide):

http://www.caida.org/publications/presentations/2014/internet_architecture_innovation_duke/

On Wednesday 1 October 2014, CAIDA hosted a small invitation only workshop that brought together researchers working on large-scale Internet outage detection and characterization with researchers from the political sciences with specific expertise in Internet censorship, political violence (including Internet connectivity disruption ordered by authoritarian regimes for censorship), and Internet penetration. Participants viewed and demonstration of and discussed CAIDA’s current data analysis platform for the exploration of historical and realtime Internet measurement data (named “Charthouse”), and possible extensions of the platform to support political science research related to  macroscopic Internet outages.

 A primary use of our current platform is to detect/characterize large-scale Internet outages, i.e., entire regions or countries getting disconnected from the Internet for hours or days. We intend to extend the platform to enable more agile analysis, support larger datasets, improve geographic-based exploration and visualization, based on use case scenarios defined together with political scientists.

The workshop also included experts from the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Data Enabled Scientific Computing Group, who provided valuable insights into methods for scalable analysis of large data sets requiring high performance computing platforms.  We currently plan to implement part of the Charthouse platform using the Spark/Shark data analytics stack.

As economic pressure imposed by IPv4 address exhaustion has grown, we seek methods to track deployment of IPv6, IPv4’s designated successor. We examine per-country allocation and deployment rates through the lens of the annual “Day in the Life of the Internet” (DITL) snapshots collected at the DNS roots by the DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) from 2009 to 2014.

For more details of data sources and analysis, see:
http://www.caida.org/research/policy/dns-country/