The New York Times is now reporting on the hacking of the websites of ICANN and IANA. For many of the folks who've been attempting to conduct research on the Internet and make improvements to its structure, this comes as no surprise. And yet, the scientific community faces a continuing data acquisition crisis -- they're prevented from collecting the information they need to know how the Internet works and how we might improve it. At the heart of the matter is an utter disregard by regulators and policy makers to mandate that companies make information available that had been in the public domain previously, but which they now claim to be proprietary. Until that's done, the security and structure of the Internet will continue to face failures, with the degree of chaos only certain to grow in coming years.

Back in December 2006, I organized the COMMONS Strategy Workshop at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Now, a year-and-a-half later, Google is getting into the game and is hosting a two-day, off-the-record strategy session to put the ideas behind the COMMONS Project into practice.

It's fantastic being here -- 25-30 incredibly brilliant folks from across North America & Europe working to solve the problem that there's far too little data available to network research. This data acquisition crisis is remarkably dangerous -- we very much do not know what's happening across the Internet, how to solve growing problems, or even whether the problems being claimed by ISPs are, in fact, real.

I'm hopeful that by cloistering ourselves off for a few days we'll generate ideas that can be put into practice, both in the short term and over time.

A number of folks have asked me to provide my plenary presentation from the Broadband in Cities and Towns Conference that took place October 30-31, 2007. Better Broadband for Cities and Towns and the Rise of Open Technology explores the explosive growth of community wireless networking around the globe and highlights a half-dozen networks, the implementation of the CAIDA COMMONS Project to interlink participating networks, and emergent open technologies that will shift community networks to a "device as infrastructure" model.

Attached is a copy of the October 15, 2007 COMMONS presentation I gave at the Rural Telecommunications Congress in Springfield, Illinois. The presentation is an overview of the COMMONS Project, a research initiative to provide broadband access to communities in return for networking data for scientists. A more in depth overview of the COMMONS Project can be read here.

I recently gave a presentation on the COMMONS project at the 2007 Telecommunications Policy and Research Conference (TPRC). The presentation is based on the Final Report of the 2006 COMMONS Strategy Workshop which my colleague, kc claffy, and I drafted up.

A witty and irreverent take on my presentation at Freedom to Connect from the good folks at ISP Planet:

At the Freedom to Connect conference, Sascha Meinrath pitched the next way we're going to eliminate the telcos from the upstream. He was talking about the CUWiN Foundation (specializing in "Community Wireless Solutions"). (It was originally the website of the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Net.)

He called the talk: Cooperative Networking (a.k.a everything else is stupid).

He pointed out that a 1 Mbps upstream connection is $10 per month in San Francisco, $80 to $90 per month in Chicago, $320 per month in Urbana, and over $1,300 per month in a town you've never heard of, Greenup. And a $1,500 wireless link can take bandwidth to almost anywhere.

"But if we had a free market, wouldn't someone bring bandwidth from where it's cheap to where it's expensive?"

It turns out that there is a network connecting all of Illinois, called the Illinois Century Network (ICN) (map .pdf).

It could provide cheap bandwidth to schools. "So why isn't it being done? Is it technology? Economics? No, it's layer 8 political BS!"

An attendee understood immediately. "Of course, this network can only be used for 'research.' But if we're doing research on how the network gets used (by all sorts of people), then all traffic has a research purpose. Clever."

There are plenty of other solutions to network the nation. For example, if community broadband becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, the local networks could all peer with each other and create a nationwide mesh.

So will it work? It's all being done on a case by case basis, as opportunities present themselves. But we're interested and hope to interview Meinrath in the near future as this project progresses.

In his introduction, Meinrath said, "I'm not about home networking. That's not what I do. I'm not talking about the mesh network. I'm talking about what's next. The next bandwagon that will eliminate the telcos. The telcos hated community networking, but now they're leading the charge. These networks are all over the place, but they're not connected to each other, and they're still relying on the telcos who hate them."

"Still relying on the telcos who hate them." That sounds very, very familiar.

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This week I'm in Washington, DC for the Freedom to Connect Conference and to talk with congressional staff about the need for research projects like COMMONS. I just finished up a panel where I gave a presentation on cooperative networking (AKA the COMMONS Project).

Strategy Workshop to discuss the COMMONS (Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems) initiative

Final workshop report for the COMMONS (Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems) Workshop held in December, 2006, authored by: Sascha Meinrath, CAIDA, sascha @ caida.org kc claffy, CAIDA, kc @ caida.org

Executive Summary

On December 12-13, 2006, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) held a workshop to discuss and ultimately propose a collaboration among researchers and networks to simultaneously solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet: a self-reported financial crisis in the Internet infrastructure provider industry that poses a severe threat to broadband growth and U.S. competitiveness; a data acquisition crisis which has deeply stunted the field of network science; and a dilemma within emerging community, municipal, regional, and state networks, who need (additional) broadband connectivity but face severely 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. COMMONS Peering will be conditionally available to city, county, state, and federal government entities, academic institutions, community Internet initiatives (e.g., community wireless networks), and commercial entities based upon the following three conditions: (1) networks will make select operational data available to COMMONS researchers (under appropriate legal data sharing and privacy guards); (2) the attached networks must agree to develop and abide by COMMONS policies which will be based upon research results of empirical data analyses of network usage; and, (3) participating networks must abide by the Acceptable Use Policies set by the COMMONS project coordination committee.

CAIDA hosted 40 networking visionaries from across North America at the UCSD campus to discuss technical, policy, and operational issues related to the COMMONS initiative. This "COMMONS Strategy Workshop" brought together representatives from industry, community and municipal networks, regional and state networks, as well as Internet researchers, community organizers, and developers building next-generation data communications technologies. Workshop participants also included heads of research, infrastructure, media, and policy organizations, as well as telecommunications lawyers. The diversity of workshop participants helped ensure that all major project stakeholders were represented in the proceedings and provided invaluable insights into the potential pitfalls and opportunities the COMMONS Project faces in coming years.

At a time when research on broadband service provision is desperately needed to help forge new national telecommunications policies and inspire innovation in networking technologies [1], the COMMONS Project is an innovative platform that will provide vital research results for policy makers across the country and around the world. This report describes the findings from the COMMONS Strategy Workshop, outlines a set of relevant open research problems identified by participants, and concludes with recommendations that will benefit the scientific community, network operators and developers, key decision-makers, and the general populace.

Read more...

Lots of folks have asked me for a copy of the presentation I gave at the 2007 National Conference for Media Reform. Beyond LANS, MANS, and Community Intranets: The CAIDA COMMONS Project is available here. The general COMMONS Project website is currently housed at: http://www.caida.org/projects/commons.

The COMMONS Project seeks:

to simultaneously solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet: a self-reported financial crisis in the Internet infrastructure provider industry; a data acquisition crisis which has severely stunted the field of network science; and a struggle for survival within emerging community and municipal networks, who are in an ideal position to address the first two problems but often lack resources and experience to make informed operational decisions, and are also continually threatened by incumbent-driven legislation.

This week, three dozen visionaries and thought leaders are meeting in San Diego to plot out how to build the COMMONS. Information on the Workshop is available here. I'll going to look into getting permission to post the participants list (it's really an incredible group of people).