[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.

Read the rest of this entry »

the U.S. FCC is trying to improve the way it measures broadband penetration, though the primary mode of measurement is still gathering data from the providers themselves. some meta-data on how the big three (verizon, att, tw) track penetration of their network infrastructures for the last year:

Read the rest of this entry »

CAIDA, ISC, OARC, and The Measurement Factory managed to repeat our annual Day in the Life of the Internet data collection experiment this year — using a 2-day window of 18-19 March 2008. As with last year’s DITL (DITL2007 announcement, DITL2007 summary), we tried to capture a complete 48-hour interval of traffic to as many DNS root nameservers as could participate, and also invited other data providers to participate on terms compatible with their data sharing policies. if you engage in ongoing measurement of an operational network, and collected data for some or all of 18-19 mar 2008, it’s not too late to contribute data or metadata to DITL2008!

Read the rest of this entry »

one of my favorite program managers is posed the following question by senior management at his defense-related funding agency: “we should be able to do a much better job modeling internet attacks. what research can we fund that would enable us to do a better job at modeling internet attacks?”

Read the rest of this entry »

[ 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. ]

Read the rest of this entry »

as part of my interest in solving problems of the internet [as related to me by several dozen engineers of operational commercial Internet infrastructure], i pay attention to proposals to improve the conditions of telecommunications research, such as in april 2007 when a UCSD professor testified in front of the U.S. Senate Commerce Subcommittee about the results of a 2006 National Academy of Sciences workshop on Renewing U.S. Telecommunications Research. i looked inside the report for answers to the data sharing problem. i think they’re postponing that for later. instead i found these recommendations:

Read the rest of this entry »

As the era of the NSFnet Backbone Service came to a close in April 1995, the research community, and the U.S. public, lost the only set of publicly available statistics for a large national U.S. backbone. The transition to the commercial sector essentially eliminated the public availability of statistics and analyses that would allow scientific understanding of the Internet a macroscopic level.

In 2004 I compiled an (incomplete) list of what we generally can’t measure on the Internet, from a talk I gave on our NSF-funded project correlating heterogeneous measurement data to achieve system-level analysis of Internet traffic trends:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

A reprint of a recent interview of kc claffy posted by the San Diego Supercomputer Center regarding the future of the Internet:

kc claffy has played a leading role in Internet research for more than a decade. She is the principal investigator for the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) which is based at SDSC and provides tools and analyses to promote a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. As a research scientist at SDSC her research interests include the collection, analysis, and visualization of workload, routing, topology, performance, and economic data on the Internet. She has been at SDSC since 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego.

Q: You co-founded the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, CAIDA, a little over 10 years ago. Can you tell us how CAIDA has evolved, and what you’re focusing on today?

Read the rest of this entry »

IEEE published this announcement of a new series of papers related to Internet economics in its may issue:
http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2007/ieeecon/
MAY – JUNE 2007 1089-7801/07/$25.00 c 2007 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society 53 Internet Economics Track Editors: Scott Bradner – sob@harvard.edu kc claffy – kc@caida.org kc claffy and Sascha D. Meinrath Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis Scott O. Bradner Harvard University

The (un)Economic Internet?

The Internet Economics track will address how economic and policy issues relate to the emergence of the Internet as critical infrastructure. Here, the authors provide a historical overview of internetworking, identifying key transitions that have contributed to the Internet’s development and penetration. Its core architecture wasn’t designed to serve as critical communications infrastructure for society; rather, the infrastructure developed far beyond the expectations of the original funding agencies, architects, developers, and early users. The incongruence between the Internet’s underlying architecture and society’s current use and expectations of it means we can no longer study Internet technology in isolation from the political and economic context in which it is deployed.

Read the rest of this entry »