I’ve written before about the growing consensus among experts that the Internet’s underlying communications routing algorithms are fundamentally unscalable, so I am delighted to have CAIDA’s routing research group led by Dima Krioukov achieve some fundamental routing research results worth extensive media coverage. We have not solved the Internet’s routing scalability problem, but these recent discoveries will help that cause.

(more…)

i gave a (faster, less understandable) version of this talk (pdf or slides+audio quicktime) at the October 2008 ARIN meeting in Los Angeles (original October version) and again to ISOC’s advisory council meeting in November. motivation: the end of the current addressing architecture, with scant understanding of how to retain all its positive features in the face of inevitable change. a topic i worry about more each year.

(peter cincotti sings as if we knows what we’re going through.)

(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.

(more…)

[Jump to a Top Ten item: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10]

#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.

(more…)

[Jump to a Top Ten item: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10]

#8: The opaqueness of the infrastructure to empirical analysis has generated many problematic responses from rigidly circumscribed communities earnestly trying to get their jobs done.

(more…)

[Jump to a Top Ten item: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10]

#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.

(more…)

[Jump to a Top Ten item: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10]

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

(more…)

i get this question a lot:

at the current churn rate/ratio, at what size does the
FIB need to be before it will not converge? (also sometimes pronounced ‘when will the current Internet routing architecture break?’)

a good question, has been asked many times, and afaik no one has provided any empirically grounded answer.

a few realities hinder our ability to answer this question.

(more…)