Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

Important things:
1) We need to change legal policies to allow more research of the Internet in order to make better policy decisions in the future.
2) There are serious problems with the Internet that need to be addressed, and even though some solutions have been conceived, the deployment of them is hindered by economic, political, and social factors.
3) Solving the challenges that the Internet currently faces will require more than short-term profit incentives of individual providers.

Problems:
I can sense through the paper frustration that she must experience as she tries to go about her research in studying Internet structure and traffic characteristics. This is of course a real problem, though she might come off as complaining about how difficult it is to get her own work done. The topic addressed by this paper is fairly broad and can have many more dimensions than those discussed.

Future Work:
Future work in this area should address the conflicting concerns that are make innovation and development on the Internet difficult.

Ten Things Lawyers Should know about the Internet May 25, 2009

Paper brings to the attention about various legal and economic issues of internet associated with internet which prevents us to understand Internet behaviour, usage pattern,   architectural limitations. These issues are mostly due to economics, ownership or trust rather than technical.

. Understanding of these issues is key to solving legal challenges faced by technology advancements.  Even with these limitations few available data points presents a dire picture of the situation including the limited number of IP addresses, vulnerabilities in different layers.

Data collection and analysis which has been established for financial systems has not succeeded for Internet. This has been partly due to muddy legal territory and objection to any kind of surveillance in US. Inability to do research has resulted in the contradiction of the view points for basic issues such as whether QoS based services make sense or not. In the absence of access to private data, interferences drawn from studies are highly biased favouring the amount of personal information extracted from data.

Paper further emphasise the aspects of the internet that there is not much government structure defining all the aspects of internet.  The opaqueness of the infrastructure to empirical studies have complicated the solution to two most important issues: IPV4 addresses and scalability limitations of the routing architectures.

Finally paper concludes that the assumption that compete ting entities will finally cooperate for architectural changes which are not upto their short term interest  is flawed. Engineers have provided solution to all the technical challenges expecting the private sectors to adopt these solutions. Another important consideration in this is the fact that solutions have to be employed beyond the boundaries hence any solution that emphasizes the country boundaries is doomed to fail.

This fact that competing at the middle infrastructure while cooperating at the edge has resulted in lots of innovations but these innovations do not mean that regulations should be removed or transparent or accountable experimentation is not required. Any decision on technology requires the information of underlying infrastructure to weed out any false belief or any decision on the mechanism.

Public investment in knowledge production gains from universal connectivity including distribution of resulting products to all taxpayers on zero marginal cost. It is in the interest of taxpayers to directly fund for universal deployment of network infrastructure.

If these aspect are not addressed then scientific researchers in the danger of doing science without data.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

This paper is literally 10 problems that occur on the internet due mostly from economics and government security.

Major Points:
1.) Lack of Data
Since ISP’s are rather private entities that do not reveal any information to researchers; researchers are doing work without real data. This is a problem because there is a lot of money being thrown into Internet research that do not have data from operational Internet infrastructure so they are basically working in the dark. Government security is also a limitation of data being revealed.
2.) The Dire Picture
Even with the fact that data is hidden from operational Internet infrastructure, researchers still have a dire picture from a few available data points. Just from these little points, researchers show that there is a lot that we need to be concern with. So there are problems and the solutions to these problems failed to solve them because of the economics and business side of the Internet.
3.) Regulations
It is very hard to tell whether or not data is being used for malicious reasons. It is also hard tell who really owns and sent the malicious data. This calls for restructuring the internet which at this point is impossible. Regulating wiretapping, disaster recover etc… causes more concern than hope too.

Glaring Problem:
This paper reveals a lot of problems with Internet research and even talks about the people that need to do something. They do not provide an real concrete solutions to all of their problems but they do mention that the solutions will cross boundaries.

Future Work:
With the internet growing so fast, the government needs to catch up. Although the internet was develop for file sharing, it is getting limited by copyright and security problems. Privateness and economic issues are severely slowing down Internet research and as time goes by our Internet infrastructure may not last without real Internet research helping it. This paper is challenging the policy makers to help create a better researching environment on the Internet.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

The article gives a good overview of several legal aspects related to the Internet and how research is hampered by regulatory issues related to the Internet that do not encourage research in this area. The Internet was initially developed as a research poject with the assumption that all the users would cooperate with each other. However, it has turned into a mammoth infrastructure that is used by billions of people today for communication.

The other aspect about the Internet is that several technical problems with the Internet have been discovered by the research community and the research community has proposed several ideas and techniques to solve them. However, the incentives to adopt these new ideas have been very few, and often the ecnomics of the change or legal frameworks do not allow such changes. This has led to the Internet turning into a fairly inefficient system. Although it works, it could be made a lot better.

An important factor about the Internet is that although different countries impose certain laws on the usage of the measured data, taking measurements etc, the Internet is largely unregulated or rather regulated in a distributed fashion. There is no single authority that dictates how the Internet should be used. This makes regulation a very difficult problem.

The article does not really provide any directions to solve these problems about the regulatory and business aspects of the Internet. While several problems are suggested, it would have been nice to have some directions towards possible solutions as well.

It would be interesting to explore how to create competitive advantages to ideas to solve the problems of the Internet. This would offer incentives to ISPs to adopt them. Also, there should be incentive for the government to support active research in the area. The laws governing the use of the Internet should be modified in the wake of the rapidly changing and deregulated Internet.

Ten things lawyers should know about the internet May 25, 2009

This paper tries to convey a message of cooperative measurement and modeling of open networked systems and the challenges and roadblocks that exist in pursuit of this goal. The author has tried to convey certain thoughts to the lawyers about how to update legal frameworks to best accomodate information technologies in the 21st century. The author has tried to list her thoughts which are:

• There is a need to update existing legal frameworks to accommodate empirically grounded research into the things that have to be built, used and costs to sustain them. She stresses that current frameworks prevent sharing of data with researchers to scientifically investigate the technology advances. The author thinks that the scientific knowledge about internet is weak because of its shared and distributed nature and the roadblocks are economic rather than technical.
• The author also argues that there are several known limitations with whatever data that researchers have and that itself call for concern. There are concerted efforts too in that direction but most of them happen in small pockets and that too with several pitstops.
• The author stresses repeatedly the lack of data available in the field which the progress towards knowing a lot about this complex system and finding out ways to deal with it. There are a lot of restrictions on data sharing put by the government (for security reasons) or private competent players for their own economic motives.
• The author comments that network community is not able to perform research on the very network backbones provided to them to do so.
• The author also points out the fact that a growing number of segments of society spend large amount of money in performing internet measurements but they are not in pursuit of answers related to technical weaknesses but they are happening for purposes of security or business to maximize the amount of personal information that can be extracted from the data.
• The author argues that government organizations who are policymakers are themselves reluctant to disclose the much needed information on how the internet is engineered, used and financed.
• The author notices a positive side to this end that internet’s practical promise is 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.
• The author also states that available data shows clear directions for solutions which cross policy-technology boundaries similar to interdisciplinary research into the network which is not emphasized a lot.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

Although this paper has ten points which concern laws and the Internet, they can be boiled down to three:

1. The laws relating to copyright, privacy, wiretapping, and common carriage are not relevant to the Internet today. Furthermore, trying to apply them to the Internet has many deleterious effects with no real gains, since the usage model of the Internet differs so much from the services provided at the time when the laws were written.
2. Furthermore, we actually know very little about the Internet from an empirical perspective. This is due to two factors. First, much of the current legislation (see point 1) makes it impossible (or rather, illegal) to gather the very information that would illuminate the usage patterns on the Internet. This hamstrings researchers, who are able to come up with many wonderful theories about current or future traffic patterns, algorithms, etc., but are unable to test or validate them on the Internet at large. Secondly, even when legal, these same efforts are frustrated by the fact that the Internet is composed of many private companies only motivated by relatively short-term financial concerns and unconcerned with the viability of their practices in the mid- to far future.
3. With both the legal and financial restrictions on what can and cannot be implemented, the Internet as it stands today is in a fair amount of risk. The underlying routing and naming services are insecure because they were designed for an Internet that is very different from the one present today. Not only are they insecure, but they are not designed to scale to the size of the modern Internet. Even though these problems are evident from even the limited amount of data available under current laws and from the companies operating the core routers in a secretive manner, the educated people who have exposed these problems are helpless to enact any change at a global level.

The main problem with this paper (and likely this summary) is that it views the current state of the Internet from a very pessimistic perspective. While it may be true that there are many unresolved problems on the Internet, it is risky for the researchers to look down from an ivory tower and proclaim that the Internet is doomed unless we do X, Y, and Z. What does need to happen is that government regulation needs to be designed in such a way as to not stifle the approaches that the market takes to optimizing the Internet for its current and future needs.

Future research needs to look at ways to incentivize the change that researchers think needs to be implemented. Unless they can provide economic incentives for the companies that control the Internet, then the changes will fall on deaf ears.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

This paper dares to raise some pertinent questions that Internet researchers have long overlooked. Main points are:

1. The author provides ten reasons why she thinks Internet research is not progressing in the way other sciences have. She identifies the major impediment as the incentive model. The major stakeholders in the Internet like ISPs, Government, Internet companies have strong disincentives against sharing usage data with the researchers. This in turn places the intelligent researchers at a great disadvantage because they will have to work with assumptions and simulations without access to any real data.
2. The author rightly says that the pace of our understanding of the working of Internet has been far lower than the pace of Internet growth. This has led to a situation where multi-billion dollar investments are being made by businesses and Government without a thorough knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes. No one has the right intuition as why Internet is working as it is today.
3. The security companies have a tendency to exaggerate the dire consequences facing Internet security, which has led to disproportionate funding in that area. Such hysterical environment suits those companies best too. This has often come at the cost of other more fundamental areas critical to through understanding of Internet dynamics. Moreover, since there is no one agency that can be in-charge of Internet as a whole, most wonderful research ideas and solutions are far from being deployed. A case in point is IPv6 in layer-3. No one is willing to take the responsibility to overcome the economic implications of this transition.

Since this is an article on the state of Internet research, there are no obvious drawbacks. The author makes cogent arguments about the reasons behind our lack of understanding of the Internet. What is missing though is a proposal for an Internet where the major players have a direct incentive to share data without compromising the privacy of their users with researchers.

There needs to be an open culture in the Internet innovation, where good ideas find their way to the real world. Unless these ideas percolate, we will be stuck with a system that we know is dificient, but we are not able to do anything about it. Future studies should focus on how to achieve these goals.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About The Internet May 25, 2009

1. Internet research is hampered primarily by issues of economics, ownership, and trust. NSF and DARPA pulled out of funding network research. Topology mapping and simulation is blocked by  ownership and trust issues. The researchers who have access to privately owned traffic and topographical data are not allowed to share their data with other researchers to reproduce research results.

2. There are vulnerabilities in naming and routing of internet infrastructure for solutions have been developed but failed to gain traction due to political and economic constraints. ICANN, FCC, other agencies lacks the architecture, legitimacy, and authority to enforce any regulations.

3. Researchers are unable to perform proper basic network research under all the EOT constraints.  With funding and on networks established to support academic network research, researchers still cannot do basic scientific research using proper scientific method researchers of other fields expect.

This paper provides an excellent overview of the problems with the internet and internet research. Further research can be done on ways to solve the problems with the internet and internet research highlighted in the paper.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

1. It is difficult to make accurate measurements of the Internet due to issues of security and policy. For instance, ISPs do not want their topologies publicly known, as it may provide an edge over their competitors. Most companies would deny outside parties access to its traffic to protect trade secrets and keep various other information out of public knowledge. Also, many home users prefer to keep their network usage habits private. In addition, for those entities that do provide some form of information, the information from one entity may not be compatible with those from other entities (i.e. different bases of measurement), or may not be reliable or even useful.
2. Because it is difficult to obtain accurate measurements of the Internet, it is difficult to set or change policies related to it. “It works” is not a meaningful metric, and if no problems are apparent or imminent, then the easiest thing to do is nothing; conversely, if one entity wishes to further its own agenda through publishing biased information, it becomes difficult to oppose due to lack of evidence to the contrary.
3. Even if accurate measurements are available and policy is set, it is difficult to enforce. There is no “governing body” with any real authority over the Internet. In general, connections are usually overseen by the government where they are located, but one agency cannot enforce anything under another’s jurisdiction. The IETF may hold some sway, but there is nothing to stop anyone from ignoring it.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

(i) the three most important things the paper says

The most important topic that this paper addresses is the fact that our current laws regarding the internet are completely counterintuitive when looking at improving the internet’s infrastructure.  It completely hinders any progress that relates to actual internet topology and requires researchers to make extrapolations that may or may not be accurate.  I believe that the author is completely correct when stating that legislation around the use of internet topology must make its way to a more cooperative standpoint.  Another important idea that this paper addresses is that if the legislation around the internet does not change, we could cause quite a bit of disaster by choosing incorrect directions for the future of the internet.  IPv6 is a great example of this.  Researchers were not truly able to perform the research necessary to profile this new protocol without physically putting it out in the wild, so to speak.  The paper calls for laws, or at least guidelines, to be put into place so that acquiring an internet topology isn’t so prohibitively difficult, expensive, or in some cases illegal.  Not only would researchers be able to validate their own observations, but other teams of researchers would also be able to help validate the results of others (given this consistent set of data about the internet).  Another important idea addressed by the paper is that through this sort of secrecy about the internet, not even those organizations that have power over internet legislation and organization actually know what’s going on.  This makes it very difficult for even them to make decisions about how the architecture of the internet should progress.  This alone should constitute some sort of change about how information about the topologies of the internet are shared.

(ii) the most glaring problem with the paper

I don’t mean to pick on minor details about the paper, but i found the method of citation very distracting and disturbing to the flow of the paper.  I am much more comfortable with the list of references appearing at the end of the paper, so not to distract the reader throughout the paper itself.  I also found the paper to be very repetitive throughout some of the sections.

(iii) the future research directions of the work.

The future directions of this work are heavily based in legislation.  Those who have legislative power must act on changing the laws surrounding the internet for any of the topics addressed in this paper to actually gain legislative visibility on the proper scale.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

Three major contributions:

1. Made it clear that, because of economic and political pressures, it is extremely difficult to obtain data from real world networks. This makes it impossible to do any real scientific studies about the behavior and characteristics of the Internet. As a result, policies that could have a profound impact on the world will not be based on fact, but intuition about what might be going on in the Internet.
2. It is not clear how vulnerable the Internet is in reality. People say that it can’t be that bad because “it still works,” but this is only the case because the criminals depend on the Internet being functional as much as the law abiding users.
3. Lawmakers and Politicians have not caught up to the progression of technology. Industries that have a tremendous amount of economic and political power today are founded on laws that are very out of date. (i.e. copywriting, security, common transport)

Major problem:

While this paper is informative, it paints a very gloomy picture for the future of the internet and offers no “next step” to make any progress in a correct direction. In addition, the paper criticizes other network research publications for lack of real world data but provides no real world data itself.

Future implications:

Once again, the human race will have to deal with the unintended consequences of their actions. The Internet is the largest and most complex system ever built by man, and it is not being used for what it was originally designed for. Politicians and business people will have to work together in order to redefine the policies and industries that are currently in place today. This presents an extremely difficult social as well as technical problem.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About The Internet May 25, 2009

This booklet is a list of points explaining legal challenges surrounding the current state of legality of network research and the impact of this state on the research itself. Also it provides an overview of incentives (or the lack of) that are responsible for sharing of knowledge and data between researchers.

The main point of the paper is the need for updates to the legal framework surrounding network research, because the current state effectively hinders the acquisition of large-scale representative data from the Internet, which makes the measurement research and interpretations weak. This has also effects on the law-making process and regulation for network providers, because no reliable third-party information is available to guide these processes.

Furthermore, the paper points out that the research that is done points to problems in the current state of the internet architecture, but the impact of those problems cannot be estimated due to missing knowledge about the inner workings in provider networks and missing public information about the Internet topology. Also, the author criticizes the shortness of research outlooks, where funding agencies only fund research proposals which return results on a time scale of less than five years, which hinders researchers in getting to the fundamental problems surrounding the Internet.

For glaring problems and future research, I personally think that the technical community has to communicate more and more with politics, regulation agencies and lawyers involved in the lawmaking process to sensibilize them for ordinary people’s issues for their daily Internet usage, but also to uncover the incentives for companies and lobbyists which are representing network providers. If we don’t improve the education on technical/regulatory issues for these people, the impact of the research work will be limited.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

Technical issues that may begin to limit the growth of the Internet are tied to the administrative policy of service providers. This policy lacks the legal regulation that could enforce a comprehensive strategy to insure unhindered growth. The biggest challenges are address space and global routing. A solution exists for the address space problem. The routing problem which requires cooperation from competing entities has not been addressed.

Regulation needs to be based on scientific knowledge. Comprehensive scientific knowledge of the Internet does not exist because competing service providers keep confidential the operational mechanics of their private networks. The lack of addresses will eventually force conversion to IPv6 which provides a much larger address space. Optimized global routing will reduce costs and ensure reachability. Routing is determined by confidential agreements between service providers. The proprietary nature of the Internet limits its study and thus hinders regulation and prevents global policy.

The premise that these problems have consequences cannot yet be proven. Much like global warming, the indicators exist and scientists agree that there is a problem and it will have consequences. While the Environment is too large and complex to make any proof about the future, the Internet is not. EOT issues prevent the study of the Internet.

The author does an excellent job of presenting the issues. However, no solutions are presented. How are we to proceed in order to address these problems? Further data collection is required. What data is required from the ISPs? Can they be motivated to provide this data? Is regulation that certain data be provided possible without hindering competition? If global strategy requires regulation and regulation requires data then the first step may be regulation that allows the collection of such information.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About The Internet May 25, 2009

(i) Three most important things

1. Updating legal frameworks to accommodate technological advancement of communications capabilities 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. Unfortunately, current legal frameworks for network provisioning prevents sharing of data with researchers, making Internet behavior, usage, patterns, architectural limitations, and economics constraints difficult to understand.

2.  Public policy intended to protect individual user privacy places the research community in the illogical situation of not being able to do the most basic network research even on the networks established explicitly to support academic network research. This inability to do research on our own networks has lead to contradictions in the field of science that cannot be resolved. Two papers (Why Premium IP Service Has Not Deployed and The Evolving Internet – Traffic, Engineering, and Roles) on the costs and benefits of using QOS to support multiple service classes and how these service classes should be determined has contradictory arguments.

3.  The opaqueness of the Internet infrastructure to experimental analysis has generated many problematic responses from rigidly constrained communities trying to get their jobs done. The IETF attempted to solve the technical limitations of the current IPv4 protocol, primarily the insufficient number of addresses and the inherent scalability limitations of the routing architecture. The IETF couldn’t find an approach that would yield an architecture that made progress on both problems and so solely focused on building a new network architecture that had a larger number of addresses. Yet a larger number of addresses actually exacerbates the routing problem so many experts are grim about the future of IPv6.

(ii) Most glaring problem

The most glaring problem would be that the paper lists all these issues on how the government restricts them from researching in depth the Internet infrastructure due to privacy concerns without mentioning how researchers could work with policymakers and the FCC to possibly retrieve the data needed.

(iii) Future Research Directions

Future research directions for this work would be for scientific researches to make progress by working with legal experts in answering Internet research problems such as the ongoing discrepancies between supposedly scientific studies and suggest what data is needed to investigate these problems.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About The Internet May 25, 2009

1)

i. Internet research is largely not based on real data. This is because there are no good tools for simulating the internet. Furthermore ISPs do not share information about their infrastructure or who they connect with. It is also very hard to analyze internet traffic due to privacy concerns. The end result is that the internet is a very complex network and no one has a really good idea of how it works.

ii. ISPs economic model is not sustainable. They just move packets around and try to maximize profit by determining to what peer they pass the packet on to.

iii. The internet was not designed for what it is today. It was originally supposed to be a government supported file sharing system. Now it has been leveraged into a cooperative network of ISPs and now supports streaming video, VoIP, P2P file sharing, and many other uses it was never designed for.

2) The biggest flaw in this paper was the fact it was the worst article I have ever read in my entire life (academic or otherwise) and I am not exaggerating. There was so much fluff and very little substance, I would say about maybe 5-10% of the article was actual substance. And for things that were actually interesting such as why the ISPs economic model is not sustainable, little to no reason was given to back it up. Also it is not necessary to have a citation for every single word. Kimberly Claffy should not be allowed to write anything ever again.

3) Clearly future research needs to be done in getting a better understanding of how the internet works. Perhaps research efforts that collaborated with ISPs, but make an effort to protect an ISPs interest of not letting competitors know about its infrastructure could get something done.

The Things Lawyers Should Know about the Internet May 25, 2009

(i) The three most important things the paper says:

1) The actual data that we have regarding the Internet is very shallow and the primary reason for this is economical.  Claffy explains that while funding is being provided to areas such as national security, however zero dollars on infrastructure.  She goes on to say that the current timing is also bleak, since we are at a time of sustaining internet growth, it would require an extraordinary amount of capital and realignment of incentives to make this possible.  I feel this is an important because although the Internet was originally derived for research and national security, we as society lost sight of that.  In fact the original purpose of the internet was lost as it became commercialize, therefore this point is important to capture.

2) The silver lining is that perhaps its not bad since the internet has successfully “connected people” even though the focus was initially to provide computing.  Claffy argued that the internet would not have grown at the fast rate if it were not for its effect in connecting people.  I feel that this is an important point, since it provides reasoning to think contrary to popular economic arguments.  Based on the Internet’s success in connecting people and providing individual freedom, perhaps we should keep it deregulated and anonymous.  What if changing its current model will break the Internet and have irrevocable “social” effects?

3) The problem of not having enough information about internet infrastructure is not new; in fact there has already been attempts to address it unsuccessfully.  Claffy indicated several institutions (e,g, National Science Foundation) and projects (e.g. PREDICT) to remedy this problem. I feel that these are important points, as it indicates what has been tried and failed.  Moving forward as we try to solve this problem, we should learn from the mistakes of the past, such as how to get around the fact that ISP may be liable for its traffic.  Perhaps if we solve that problem, ISPs will be more willing to provide help to researchers for analysis of the internet infrastructure.

(ii) The most glaring problem with the paper:

The biggest problem with the paper is there lack of consideration of how the commercial space has also help the internet infrastructure as well.  For instance the addition of 3G wireless overlay to expand connectivity.  This paper seems a bit bias in blaming the economic incentives of corporations in preventing research.  However it doesn’t talk about how companies has spent much R&D budget to further the internet infrastructure as well.

(iii) The future research directions of the work:

The future research of the work would be to either find new ways to monitor Internet or find ways to battle the legalities currently hindering research.  For instance, how do we protect ISPs and or music publishers in a way that facilitates the discimnation of internet traffic data.  Or another area of research could be how to better monetize inteternet traffic, since this would encourage ISPs to upgrade their networks.  In summary, now that Claffy indicated the problems and the unsuccessful attempts at solving it; the next logical steps is to address the problems.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

Three Important Things:

• There are currently many outdated legal frameworks in place regarding the internet, copyright, and privacy that are no longer relevant in today’s world. It is clear to see that these frameworks cannot keep up with the growth of the internet and its rapidly evolving usage patterns. As a consequence the internet is unregulated by government bodies such as the FCC, but at the same time largely opaque to those who would attempt to formally observe it. This is because of a legal deadlock where ISPs are unwilling to release traffic information for fear of being sued on the basis of draconian copyright acts.
• Today the structure and vital statistics of the internet are largely a mystery. Researchers have been unable to come up with meaningful results for bandwidth, quality of service, and traffic patterns. However there is a general consensus that IPv4 addresses are soon to be exhausted, the routing system is unwieldy, and that a large number of hosts and traffic are compromised from a security perspective.
• Despite the grim picture there are several lessons to be learned moving forward. The conclusion is that many problems are caused by competing entities vying for short term gain. It is the responsibility of the research community to come up with a more stable infrastructure that address scalability, fairness and security. It is up to the government to enable this research and ultimately ensure that it is implemented, even against short term cost considerations of ISPs.

Glaring Problem:

The structure of the paper detracts somewhat from its message, as the arguments presented are at times disjointed. There is some but little mention of specific bodies such as the RIAA that exacerbate and represent the legal issues plaguing the internet. Along this line, there should have been more background information on the technical usage details given the intended audience.

Future Work:

In light of the arguments presented in this paper, there is a lot of joint work to be undertaken combining the efforts of computer scientists and lawyers. This is crucial for the success of any new legal framework, as it will have to be grounded by facts and reality. The focus should first be on finding ways to circumvent the restrictions on internet measurements, and later on the prospects of general usage enforcement that enables the activities of the majority (such as file sharing) as opposed to limiting the natural evolution of the internet.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

(i) The three most important things the paper says:

1. There are numerous ominous signs of major problems looming over the internet today. A few examples listed by the author are: It is that it is understood that millions of machines compromised by botnets supporting criminal activity, A vast majority of Internet traffic today is illegal by current laws, routing and addressing is not scalable enough to handle current growth rate, and the economic architecture shows little hope for sustainability.

2. The biggest problem the author finds with internet today is that so little is understood about it. It is a complex hard to measure organism that must be studied so problems can begin to be addressed. The problem is that research is underfunded and data collection for research is often deemed illegal by current laws. For the few companies that manage to obtain legal data collection there are laws preventing them from sharing their data with other researches, so the credibility of their findings is always questionable because it cannot be backed up by scientific data.

3. The author decides that someone must be held accountable for regulating the internet and preventing it from succumbing to the plight that faces the internet today. At the current state the FCC has jurisdiction over regulating the internet but unfortunately the author implies that they stay blissfully unaware of the true nature of the internet. For this reason it is the job of the lawyers to take up the fight force action that enables research and through it progress for the internet.

(ii) The most glaring problem with the paper:

The biggest problems I found with the paper is that there wasn’t a clear no call to action or potential solution presented by the author. In a way this makes the paper almost seem as fear mongering more likely to cause panic than helpful results. Another thing that bothered me was that the pictures were unexplained and seemingly random. Lastly the paper seemed to jump around and not have a clear well thought out path from beginning to end.

(iii) The future research directions of the work:

The biggest research direction called for by the paper is coming up with ways to enable research and data collection easy and legal. After gaining further understanding a myriad of research topics will emerge to address problems and suggest improvements on the current internet architecture. The author presented many of already prevalent problems that all must be evalutated and answered in the upcoming years.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

(i) The three most important things the paper says:

1. There is a dearth of good data with regard to the internet. There are a number of contributing factors, with economics, ownership and trust being the greatest contributors. Although technical expertise has the ability to yield potentially vital data, the search for and distribution of collected data (or the failure to do so) is driven by privacy and security concerns and short-term profit margins. Meanwhile, policies are being made without data and researchers are blocked from producing insightful data.
2. The internet was not originally built to support the kinds of demands that we currently require of it (for example, IPv4 is no longer sufficient due to internet growth, and network infrastructure companies are trying to move more intelligence into the network in order to profit from internet traffic). It is furthermore quite difficult to make fundamental changes to support these demands.
3. The “practical promise” of the internet means that it is needed by everyone, even though it is complex and messy. There are many people with the knowledge and ability to make meaningful changes to the policy and infrastructure of the internet.

(ii) The most glaring problem with the paper:

I feel that a number of the points made in the paper seem a bit too bleak and fatalistic. Although security on the internet is definitely a major concern for the US government, I think the “big brother” scenario painted in parts of the paper is not completely justified. Wiretapping for example would still fall under search and seizure, and be protected against under the Fourth Amendment. A number of such precedents are covered in Orin Kerr’s work.

(iii) The future research directions of the work:

I think that one of the problems in meshing network research with policy is the lack of a common language spoken by both policy-makers and researchers. An important aspect of crossing the boundaries between policy and technology is ensuring that the two sides understand each other. Another potential research direction may lie in the “clean slate” internet that has been proposed by a number of people. It is possible that such a measure, properly informed by both researchers and policy-makers, might improve the future internet.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About the Internet May 25, 2009

The article is a list of serious problems in the social, political, and legal Internet landscape. It provides a rather eye opening account of how difficult it is to legally gather network data on the Internet. The article lists 10 top issues, but several seemed to be elaborations on the same basic ideas. I consider the article’s main contributions to be the following.

ISPs don’t share information for primarily business reasons. The terms of agreement between their customers and peers even prohibit details, such as logs and peering locations, to be collected or released to third parties. Because of the competitive nature of these businesses, it is unlikely that even basic topology information will be made available.

As a result, the amount of network data available to researchers is extremely limited. This presents difficulties because there can be no validation of claims made by any organization. There are many claims that “most” of the data traffic going over the backbone consists of p2p data. As the author points out, these claims cannot be backed up by any data set. The result is an environment of fact free arguments driving network policy and contradicting research publications.

The current laws are outmoded and vaguely worded to the extent that most Internet research can be classified as illegal. The author is understandably frustrated with this situation, especially given the fact that the U.S. government is actively funding network research. I find it completely ridiculous that basic network topology probing for research purposes can be considered illegal.

The problems with this article are that it provides too many cluttered points and no suggestions. If indeed this is a condensed version of a talk, the author could have spent more time distiling the key issues that need to be communicated. Furthermore, there are no suggestions for improving the landscape. A few recommendations for moving in the right direction would really be appropriate for this type of article.

I’d like to see a more concise version of this article make it to a larger reaching publication. As it is now, I don’t think it’s terribly effective despite being well researched.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About The Internet May 25, 2009

In this article, Kimberly Claffy gives an overview of the biggest legal and economical issues related to the Internet as it is today.

The most important problem with the Internet is that basically it is an unknown entity, such as it is really hard to draw any conclusion on its status. Many attempts has been done in the last decades to acquire some knowledge but all of them ended with small or inconclusive results. This is due to the fact that even if researchers have developed several instruments and platforms to measure the Internet, they still have to fight with economics, ownership and trust (EOT) issues. There is not a well defined legal framework that regulates this topic and the collection of network an communication data is pretty much illegal. Moreover, data sharing among both researchers and companies, such as ISPs, simply does not happen. Companies, as well as federal institutions, are very reluctant to share network data for basically two reasons: the first is legal. Since most of the Internet traffic is estimated to be illegal, such as content sharing of material under copyrights, the ISPs do not want to make it official because they are scared of possible legal action against them. The government institutions instead do not want to tell what they are observing, since their data is a clear violation of privacy laws. Indeed federal offices observe the Internet to gather intelligence related and national security related data.  The second biggest reason instead is that entities that manage the Internet do not want to provide information on how they structured their business to competitors, for obvious economical reasons.

However, not being able to have network real data prevents researchers to fully understand and analyse the network. This process is the core part of every attempt to modify, update or improve the existing infrastructure. How is it possible to make something better if we are not able to understand what is really going wrong with the existing implementation? That is the fundamental reason why when it comes to the real Internet everything becomes extremely challenging.

Until there will not be a clear legal regulation about what kind of data can be gathered and shared, as well as until there will not be a coherent will of the both ISPs and the governements to work together to improve the existing Internet, it will be hard to get to any real good change and knowledge of it.

TEN THINGS LAWYERS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE INTERNET May 21, 2009

This article was directed to lawyers by a UCSD Computer Science professor in order to summarize the key points that she feels that lawyers must understand about the Internet before attempting to influence policy and the legal system. Although there are obviously 10 of them, I will summarize the three points that stood out most to me concerning the themes of this class.

1.There are serious legal boundaries, particularly in the area of privacy, that prevent researchers from taking detailed studies of the Internet and even more for sharing it across the discipline so that others can work with it as well. This has let to a severe shortage of accurate information that is available for study and even less that is large enough to encompass a realistic measurement of the Internet as a whole. There have been attempts to establish systems that allow for these measurements to take place but so far have seen limited success.

2.There is no central authority for control of the Internet and while this is one of the reasons that it has grown so quickly and been so successful, it has also been detrimental to long-term research and possibly growth. Decentralized development has solved many problems but the vast majority of these have come from the private sector or universities. These sources work under constraints that are not conducive to examining problems that might occur 10 or more year from now. There is also little incentive for the private sector to change if it will result in reduced profits with no tangible benefit to the customer.

3.Digital policy must be made with realistic and accurate data in hand in order to make informed decisions. Currently, the majority of policy is being influenced and created by the large providers such as the ISPs, and well as organizations that are having their business models challenged, like the RIAA. If the researchers do not even have a decent amount of good data, then it will be impossible to present it to the policy makers in a way that will ensure that they truly understand the problem. Luckily, the author points out that the Internet has grown from the desire for knowledge, something that is unlikely to fade and something that should drive the growth of the Internet forward, regardless of the obstacles.

I did not seen many issues with this paper as I thought that it did a good job of summarizing its points in clear and easy to read language. It thought that there was a few more citations that really seemed necessary but I understand that this is the legal style of writing papers and does provide for a great deal more information to read if someone feels like they want to examine the topic further.

Research in the future in this area will be new and efficient ways to measure the Internet in order to make informed decisions and well as how policy frameworks that the Internet effects (such as copywrite) should be changed in order to cope as new technologies come available. Also, the policies that hinder the collection and distribution of Internet data will likely be changed or at least made available under regulation in order to improve research and help policy makers make informed decisions.

Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About The Internet May 20, 2009

The author of this paper highlights the top ten things that are required to update the legal framework to address the issues faced by today’s Internet. The paper broadly tries to provide a solution to the problem of financial crisis of the Internet infrastructure providers, the limitations faced by network scientists for acquiring Internet data and the survival strategies used by network operators and other emerging communities. The paper is organized in a pamphlet format and goes over each of the ten points encompassing Internet data and its usage patterns and the responsibilities of regulatory authorities.

Firstly the author calls for congruence in updating legal frameworks that directly affect research communities investigating Internet usage patterns and its architectural limitations. According to the author legal sharing of data between such research communities should be allowed. The authors points out that the research about these problems of the Internet is primarily deterred by economics (NSF and DARPA pulling out their research grants), ownership and trust. No proper Internet measurement tools have emerged out of research and the government funding is mostly skewed towards network security and ironically network data seems to have been kept away from network security scientists. Although the dataset of Internet measurements it limited, it suggest that little is being done to upgrade, develop and deploy the next scalable IPv6 into the Internet infrastructure. The network is becoming all the more vulnerable by the day and policing institutions like ICANN lack the architecture and legitimacy to enforce regulations.

Data sharing between research communities is recognized as important by government funding agencies and to address this projects like PREDICT have been launched for protected sharing of research data, however such initiatives have seen snail paced progress over the years and have crippled the research communities from sharing data even on networks intended specifically for that purpose. Even security agencies and business operatives that do have access to Internet measurement data do not use it for constructive purpose but use it probe private networks thereby compromising individual privacy. Since it is widely known that most internet bandwidth is consumed by peer-to-peer sharing of files, the author calls for researchers to develop truly scalable inter-domain rout­ing and policy architectures that are content-centric, leverage best understanding of the structure of complex networks, and still manage to respect privacy.

The traffic, structure, vulnerability and pricing of Internet infrastructure are little understood even by the regulatory authorities due to the non cooperation of providers to divulge this information. The author points out that this stems from the basic problems of economics, trust and ownership, fields which are as less understood as the field of Internet traffic itself. Many communities worldwide have expressed problematic responses over the non availability of network infrastructure to be subjected to empirical analysis. The IETF for example as pointed by the authors has expressed its inability to promote the migration to scalable IP architectures simply based on consensus while facing the data handicap. Network operators on the other hand are reluctant to deploy new architectures without demand from customers and instead offer fancy QoS which with metered per-service pricing. Further the lack of content-type visibility to carries squashes their motivation to transport content that has no monetary promise. Despite all these limitations the Internet promotes individual freedom, democratic engagement and economic empowerment at many levels and offers many research directions of which the authors points out various instances. The author finally calls upon various Internet dependent communities to coordinate with each other towards a considering a global impact.

The author presents a very insightful view into the problems pervading the Internet today. She comprehensively covers and examines individual problems at the same time proposing probable solutions that have to be implemented in the near future to circumvent them. The paper however for the most part is centered only on the problems of non-availability of network infrastructure data and the lack of visible sharing of network data between research communities and this view needs to be further expanded to encompass other major problems of Internet like its traffic engineering and scalability.