Open Technology Initiative : Latest Articles

Life, Liberty and Connectivity for All

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:05:00 -0500

We live in a civil society - a place where primary education is freely available to all, where anyone can enjoy a walk through our public parks or down our sidewalks and freely drive through the streets. Libraries across the country loan out books for free - literature that you can read on a spring day in our parks or beneath the streetlights on main street on a warm summer's evening. You don't have to tip the firemen who show up at your house or pay for police protection - in a civil society, public safety is freely available to everyone.

The COMMONS Initiative

Ron Tang — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:52:00 -0400

Over the past several years, interest in municipal wireless and community networking has increased dramatically. Thus far, these initiatives have generally focused on networking local communities. The next evolution in networking involves peering these networks together. Research on broadband service provision is desperately needed to help forge new national telecommunications policies and inspire innovation in networking technologies.

With this goal in mind, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (“CAIDA”) held a workshop to discuss -- and ultimately propose -- collaboration among researchers and networks to simultaneously solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet. First, there exists a self-reported financial crisis in the Internet infrastructure provider industry that poses a threat to broadband growth and American competitiveness. Second, a data acquisition crisis has stunted the field of network science. Finally, emerging community, municipal, regional, and state networks need additional broadband connectivity but face limited provider, service level, and usage options.

The Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (“COMMONS”) Initiative proposes to build or partner with a collaborative national backbone to connect participating community, municipal, regional, and state networks to one another and to the global Internet. The COMMONS provides a platform for Internet researchers to study this infrastructure. It also provides a low-cost medium for networks to peer with one another. This approach will provide vital research results for policymakers across the country and around the world.

Part II of this article describes the findings from the initial COMMONS Strategy Workshop held in December 2006. Part III outlines relevant open research problems identified by the participants. Part IV proposes a framework for the end-to-end interconnection of networks at all levels on a national scale. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the steps necessary to bring about such a networking arrangement. Further, this section highlights the potential benefits to the scientific community, network operators and developers, key decision makers, and the general public....

For the full text of the article, please see the PDF attached below.

The New Network Neutrality: Criteria for Internet Freedom

Ron Tang — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The past year witnessed an event unprecedented in modern U.S. telecommunications history. A relatively obscure telecommunications policy debate spilled outside the rarefied airs of Congressional Committees and the Federal Communications Commission’s eighth floor to rage across the Blogosphere, major newspapers, YouTube and episodes of The Daily Show. This contentious discussion centers on an issue known as “network neutrality,” defined broadly as the non-discriminatory interconnectedness among data communication networks that allows users to access the content, and run the services, applications, and devices of their choice. Timothy Wu coined the term “network neutrality” in his seminal 2003 work, “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination,” where he forwarded the idea that network architectures should be neutral purveyors of data. Fundamentally, network neutrality forbids preferential treatment of specific content, services, applications, and devices that can be integrated into the network infrastructure. Historically, network neutrality principles have been the foundation for rapid innovation and the Internet’s relative openness. Increasingly, however, telecommunications companies have signaled that within the newly “deregulated,” post-Brand X landscape, they are eager to create tiered Internet services paralleling the cable television business model.

As Congress debates whether network neutrality protections should be written into current legislation, the battle lines have been drawn between large telecommunications companies who own the pipes, on one side, and Internet content companies and public interest groups, on the other. The meteoric rise of network neutrality’s prominence has led to current events far outpacing theoretical and historical analyses. This paper addresses this lag in scholarship by contextualizing recent events in relation to historical telecommunications antecedents. In doing so, we critically evaluate the current network neutrality debate and offer a set of technical and policy guidelines for a new, more broadly defined network neutrality. Specifically, we submit that beyond redefining network neutrality, we must connect issues usually dealt with separately -- issues that are actually a subset of one overarching concern: Internet freedom. We conclude with an exploration of the social and political impacts of this broader conception of network neutrality and suggest that this “new network neutrality” provides a proactive foundation for supporting the goal of creating a more open and participatory Internet...

For the full text of Meinrath and Pickard's article, please see the PDF attached below.