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:
[this thread on transfers is too painful to watch. here’s my take.]
Even if turning IP addresses into private property is the best policy decision of those available (which is far from demonstrated, since so little rigorous research of this question has actually occurred), executing such a policy by Board fiat while ARIN itself has no leadership is guaranteed to generate severe dissonance with ARIN’s organizational mission which includes forging public legitimacy entirely from its transparent, open processes.
[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:
I was delighted to see Sid Faber and Tim Shimeall co-teaching a “Network situational awareness” course at Carnegie-Mellon University last semester, using DatCat and DITL data, they even put the class projects online. Not only did some of the students use DITL data (contributed by Japanese academics), as well as Internet2’s netflow data, but they used DatCat to find both data sets. To quote Sid,
“About three weeks into the class, we finally got across one of the key features to the students: we were looking at how things really work on the internet, not just a theoretical discussion of RFCs. The data sets were invaluable, but we had challenges dealing with anonymization, sampling, and the overall volume of the data sets — kind of understandable for the first offering of the course.”
I (and others) have spent a bit of time over the last year encouraging Internet2 to take a more proactive role in supporting network research. So I was delighted to see the proposal of a new network research review council, which I reckon will amount to a network-research-dedicated IRB for Internet2.For most researchers, Internet2 has the closest they will get to real large-scale network operators. Internet2 operators are more willing to expose pain points and obstacles they encounter, and Internet2 provides more data about itself to the public, than any other network I know, public or private. Even better, Internet2 management is also more capable of fostering effective, cross-disciplinary, scientific Internet research than the private sector, simply by virtue of their incentive structure.
Since talking to NYT reporters is like playing the children’s game of telephone, let me clarify: any developed region with enlightened government will make sure they and neighboring regions have decent network infrastructure so they have good trading partners, for a simple economic reason: in the 21st century the most economically valuable products will be composed of bits, so nations who move bits efficiently will be at an inherent advantage. this hardly seems like news to me. that this natural evolution is destroying the NYT and most of the rest of today’s mainstream media who no longer control the majority of distribution channels is a little more newsworthy, but i’ve never seen an NYT article about that. that the addressing and routing infrastructure is not capable of handling this growth is also newsworthy, as is the U.S. government’s recent accomplishment in improving DNS security in the face of tremendous obstacles. but i guess the NYT has bigger problems than figuring out how to report news on the Internet.
(gathered earlier this year upon a student’s request)
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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“]
#10: Moreover, even in the dim light of the underattended interdisciplinary research into the network, the available data implies clear directions for solutions, all of which cross policy-technology boundaries.
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#9: The news is not all bad: there is a reason everyone wants to be connected to all the world’s knowledge — as well as each other — besides its status as the most powerful complex system ever created by man. The Internet’s practical promise for individual freedom, democratic engagement, and economic empowerment, is also unparalleled. This promise is sufficient inspiration for an open, technically literate conversation about how to invest in technologies and policies to support articulated social objectives.