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

#2: Our scientific knowledge about the Internet is weak, and the obstacles to progress are primarily issues of economics, ownership, and trust (EOT), rather than technical.

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

last year Kevin Werbach invited me to his Supernova 2007 conference to give a 15-minute vignette on the challenge of getting empirical data to inform telecom policy. They posted the video of my talk last year, and my favorite tech podcast ITConversations, posted the mp3 as an episode last week. i clearly needed more than 15 minutes.

in response to my “impassioned plea”, i was invited to attend a meeting in March 2008 hosted by Google and Stanford Law School — Legal Futures — a “conversation between some of the world’s leading thinkers about the future of privacy, intellectual property, competition, innovation, globalization, and other areas of the law undergoing rapid change due to technological advancement.” there i had 5 minutes to convey the most important data points I knew about the Internet to lawyers thinking about how to update legal frameworks to best accommodate information technologies in the 21st century. Google will be posting the talks from this meeting too, but since I probably left even more out at that meeting, I will post my top ten list of the most important things we need lawyers to understand about the Internet..one per day for the next ten days.

#1: updating legal frameworks to accomodate technological advancement requires first updating other legal frameworks to accommodate empirically grounded research into what we have built, how it is used, and what it costs to sustain.

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[ in sept 2007 i was privileged to attend an invitation-only intensely interactive workshop on the topic of Internet infrastructure economics. participants included economists, network engineers, infrastructure providers, network service providers, regulatory experts, investment analysts, application designers, academic researchers/professors, entrepreneurs/inventors, biologists, oceanographers. almost everyone in more than one category. lots of bloggers. we were all asked to write up a summary of what we learned over the 2.5 days. with permission to anonymize workshop sources of my learnings and post them here. -k. ]

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