[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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We have performed an analysis of the IP-AS mapping obtained from Routeviews/RIPE collectors.

A crucial step in various research efforts that study the Internet infrastructure is to map an IP address to the Autonomous System (AS) to which it is assigned. The most common approach to map IP addresses to ASes is by using BGP table dumps from public repositories such as Routeviews and RIPE. We assign “ownership” of an IP address to the AS that originates the longest BGP prefix that matches the IP address. Routeviews and RIPE, however, have multiple collectors, each of which peers with a diverse set of ASes. Consequently, the IP-AS mapping obtained by using the BGP table dump from one collector could be different from that obtained from a different collector. The obvious solution is to aggregate views from as many vantage points as possible to obtain the most complete IP-AS mapping possible. In practice, however, it is common to use data from just one or two collectors, as it greatly simplifies the process of collecting and pre-processing data. The goal of our analysis is to compare different collectors, in terms of the different metrics that we are interested in, viz. address space coverage, IP-AS mapping, unique ASes, unique prefixes, unique more specific prefixes, AS links, and AS paths. Further, we study the utility of adding data from more collectors, in terms of the resulting change in the aforementioned metrics. Finally, we compare the IP-AS mapping from Routeviews and RIPE tables with that obtained from Team Cymru’s whois service.

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We have studied growth trends in the number of ASes seen advertised in the global routing system from different regional registries (similar to Geoff Huston’s 32-bit AS Number Report, but with per-registry trends). We used Routeviews and RIPE BGP dumps over the last 12 years, and Team Cymru’s WHOIS lookup service to map ASNes to registries as of March 2010. To our knowledge, historical data to map an ASN to a regional registry at any given time in the past is not available, so we cannot account for ASN movement between registries. More information about the data collection and pre-processing is in our IMC 2008 paper, “Ten Years in the Evolution of the Internet Ecosystem” and our supplemental data page.

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No one was more surprised than I to see data collection requirements in the NTIA’s Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA) for the Rural Utilities Service’s (RUS) Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the Broadband Technology Opportunities Programs (BTOP):

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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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We finally posted the final report for our workshop on Active Internet Measurements (AIMS ’09). The abstract:

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Recently a group of Internet technology researchers, attorneys and policy professionals participated in a DHS-sponsored workshop, “Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects in Information and Communications Technology Network and Security Research.” Possible nickname: Belmont Flux Workshop. If you’re still glassy-eyed: (1) you have yet to engage the depths of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) in the context of network and security research; (2) you gave up after seeing “Ethical principles”; and/or (3) you think human subjects issues and network research are orthogonal.

Here’s a summary of the event, and hopefully some inspiration.

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I spent a few hours at the FCC two weeks back, presented a slide version of a top ten list I wrote last year. Requested discussion topics: obstacles to data collection, how data is collected and used, policy-making based on inference, how to develop an objective knowledge base for science and policy, privacy expectations/rights versus the need for understanding the system as critical infrastructure. Audience mostly lawyers, worried about how they are going to accomplish a reasonable broadband plan. As I tried to describe in my five-minute presentation slot (and 1 slide, and more expansive blog entry) on the broadband panel at the DOC ten weeks ago, solutions begin with recognition of some underlying empirical facts, starting with one that is strangely not being emphasized by lobbyists: you can’t make Wall-Street-approved margins moving bits around over long distances. Lot of implications to that reality; the sooner we admit it, the more realistic our broadband plan will be.

2008 was an exciting year for the Internet and no less exciting for CAIDA. As network-capable personal/computing devices became ever more affordable and ubiquitous, and developers continued the flow of [open] applications/protocols that make it easier to create, capture, edit, publish and share information at the increasing speeds allowed by optical fiber, cable, and wifi services, we continue to make vast empirically untested assumptions about how the Internet is financed, operated, and used. What’s going on under the hood of the engine of our new digitized economy?

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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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