This month Internet2’s new UCAN project issued a call for white papers on how they could use their $65M BTOP grant in operationally sustainable ways, i.e., so the infrastructure they build will have a chance of surviving when the federal stimulus project money runs out.

We held a relevant workshop 5 years ago, part of which was published in CommLaw the following year. I’ve also written several other essays on related issues:

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My recently submitted public comments on the increasingly controversial issue of ICANN’s plans to expand the generic Top Level Domain namespace indefinitely:

1. a repeat of my still unaddressed comments from the last (June 2010) economic report,
   
2. an attempt to summarize some public comments to that June 2010 report,
3. end an abbreviated historical timeline of ICANN’s economic research commitment to launching new gTLDs.

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I recently attended my first FCC Technological Advisory Council meeting (video archives). A week before the meeting we received a memo from the chairman of the committee (Tom Wheeler) notifying the committee of a “clear and challenging mandate from Chairman Genachowski: to generate ideas and spur actions that lead to job creation and economic growth in the ICT [information and communication technologies] ecosystem.” Specifically, “The TAC will focus on the short term implementation of innovative ideas to create investment and jobs, as opposed to long term regulatory changes.”

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[I submitted the following public comment to ICANN in response to their second attempt at commissioning An Economic Framework for the Analysis of the Expansion of Generic Top-Level Domain Names. I’ll link to ICANN’s summary of all public comments on this report when available. -k]

This second economic report posted 16 june (pdf) is an improvement over the June 2009 reports by Dennis Carlton (pdf, pdf) but there are still too many — and too fundamental — flaws for it to serve as the basis of any ICANN policy on new gTLDs:

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This post is our submitted response to NSF’s call for expressions of interest in the Future Internet Architectures summit, which i am attending this week.

What scientific contributions will you bring to the discussion about Future Internet architectures?

As scientists, we are compelled to explore how the peculiar structure relates to the function(s) of complex networks. Many complex networks in nature share the peculiar structural character of the Internet, but they also manifest phenomenal behavior: they efficiently route information without any observable routing protocol overhead. This achievement is currently beyond the reach of man-made networks. The Internet still uses a 30-year old routing architecture with fundamentally unscalable overhead requirements.  Yet in those 30 years, the Internet’s inter-domain topology has evolved toward a structure for which nature has superior routing technology, if only we can figure out how to use it!

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Internet infrastructure economics research”, and how to do reasonable examples of it, has come up a lot lately, so i’m posting a brief description of an academic+icann community workshop i’ve been recommending for a few years, which has yet to happen, and (I still believe) is long past due, and specifically more important than passing policies, especially emergency ones to allow IP address markets with no supporting research on the impact on security and stability of the Internet, and even at the risk of killing IPv6 altogether.]

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Last month (23 March) I was on an NTIA panel at the Department of Commerce, to recommend conditions on this broadband stimulus money, aka arm wrestling between companies. Gigi covers it in her blog; today was the deadline to finish my recommendations to DOC and NTIA:

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[drafted this entry a few months ago but have been reluctant to post because it’s incomplete. but after reading about the ARIN Board’s emergency proposal last week to create IPv4 address markets, variations of which have already been approved in European (RIPE) and Asia-Pacific (APNIC) IP address policy communities, i decided it’s complete enough. -k.]

A few policy questions on which the RIR-community should funnel address-registration tax dollars into peer-reviewed research:

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In April 2007 I was invited to David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect (F2C) conference to participate on a panel about Yochai Benkler‘s new book, Wealth of Networks (amazon, pdf chapters). In Wealth of Networks, Yochai first observes that two phenomena — communication and computation — are becoming affordable and ubiquitous at the same time that they are each becoming fundamental as input as well as output to our economic systems. He then provides empirical evidence [wikipedia] that this ubiquitous availability of information technology (communication and computational resources, or in math speak, links and nodes) among actors enables forms of collaboration so enormously effective as to offer an alternative to traditional models of production, i.e., market-based or government-backed systems.

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(gathered earlier this year upon a student’s request)

1. Abatte, Janet. Inventing the Internet. 2000.
2. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. 2006.
3. Benkler, Yochai. Freedom in the COMMONS: Towards a Political Economy of Information., Duke Law Journal. 2003.
4. Brin, David. Transparent Society. 1999.

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