Regional Address Registries, Governance and Internet Freedom

Regional Internet Address Registries (RIRs) are private, nonprofit and transnational governance entities that evolved organically with the growth of the Internet to manage and coordinate Internet Protocol addresses. The RIR's management of Internet address resources is becoming more contentious and more central to global debates over Internet governance. This is happening because of two transformational problems: 1) the depletion of the IPv4 address space; and 2) the attempt to introduce more security into the Internet routing system. We call these problems "transformational" because they raise the stakes of the RIR's policy decisions, make RIR processes more formal and institutionalized, and have the potential to create new, more centralized control mechanisms over Internet service providers and users. A danger in this transition is that the higher stakes and centralized control mechanisms become magnets for political contention, just as ICANN's control of the DNS root did. In order to avoid a repeat of the problems of ICANN, we need to think carefully about the relationship between RIRs, governments, and Internet freedom. In particular, we need to shield RIRs from interference by national governments, and strengthen and institutionalize their status as neutral technical coordinators with limited influence over other areas of Internet governance

Scarcity in IP addresses: IPv4 Address Transfer Markets and the Regional Internet Address Registries

We are running out of Internet addresses. This paper evaluates address transfer policies that Internet governance agencies are considering as a response to the depletion of the IPv4 address space. The paper focuses on proposals to allow organizations holding IPv4 addresses to sell address blocks to other organizations willing to buy them. This paper analyzes the economics of the proposed transfer policies, and conducts a systematic comparison of the policies proposed in the three main world Internet regions

Internet... the final frontier: an ethnographic account: exploring the cultural space of the Net from the inside

The research project The Internet as a space for interaction, which completed its mission in Autumn 1998, studied the constitutive features of network culture and network organisation. Special emphasis was given to the dynamic interplay of technical and social conventions regarding both the Net’s organisation as well as its change. The ethnographic perspective chosen studied the Internet from the inside. Research concentrated upon three fields of study: the hegemonial operating technology of net nodes (UNIX) the network’s basic transmission technology (the Internet Protocol IP) and a popular communication service (Usenet). The project’s final report includes the results of the three branches explored. Drawing upon the development in the three fields it is shown that changes that come about on the Net are neither anarchic nor arbitrary. Instead, the decentrally organised Internet is based upon technically and organisationally distributed forms of coordination within which individual preferences collectively attain the power of developing into definitive standards. --

Internet... the final frontier: an ethnographic account ; exploring the cultural space of the net from the inside

"The research project 'The Internet as a space for interaction', which completed its mission in Autumn 1998, studied the constitutive features of network culture and network organisation. Special emphasis was given to the dynamic interplay of technical and social conventions regarding both the net's organisation as well as its change. The ethnographic perspective chosen studied the Internet from the inside. Research concentrated upon three fields of study: the hegemonial operating technology of net nodes (UNIX) the network’s basic transmission technology (the Internet Protocol IP) and a popular communication service (Usenet). The project's final report includes the results of the three branches explored. Drawing upon the development in the three fields it is shown that changes that come about on the Net are neither anarchic nor arbitrary. Instead, the decentrally organised Internet is based upon technically and organisationally distributed forms of coordination within which individual preferences collectively attain the power of developing into definitive standards." (author's abstract)"Das im Herbst 1998 abgeschlossene Forschungsprojekt 'Interaktionsraum Internet' hat sich mit den konstitutiven Merkmalen der Netzkultur und Netzwerkorganisation beschäftigt. Im Vordergrund des Interesses stand das dynamische Zusammenspiel technischer und gesellschaftlicher Konventionen in der Organisation wie auch im Wandel des Netzes. Die ethnographisch angeleitete Binnenperspektive auf das Internet konzentrierte sich auf drei ausgewählte Bereiche, um Prozesse der Institutionenbildung und die Formen ihrer Transformation zu studieren: die hegemoniale Betriebstechnik der Netzknoten (UNIX), die grundlegende Übertragungstechnik im Netz (das Internet Protokoll IP) und einen populären Kommunikationsdienst (Usenet). Der Schlußbericht des Projekts enthält die Ergebnisse der drei Untersuchungsstränge. Gezeigt wird anhand der Entwicklung in den drei Feldern, daß sich der Wandel des Netzes weder beliebig noch anarchisch vollzieht. Das dezentral organisierte Internet beruht vielmehr auf technisch wie organisatorisch verteilten Formen der Koordination, in denen individuelle Handlungspräferenzen kollektiv definitionsmächtig werden." (Autorenreferat

Global connectivity architecture of mobile personal devices

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-207).The Internet's architecture, designed in the days of large, stationary computers tended by technically savvy and accountable administrators, fails to meet the demands of the emerging ubiquitous computing era. Nontechnical users now routinely own multiple personal devices, many of them mobile, and need to share information securely among them using interactive, delay-sensitive applications.Unmanaged Internet Architecture (UIA) is a novel, incrementally deployable network architecture for modern personal devices, which reconsiders three architectural cornerstones: naming, routing, and transport. UIA augments the Internet's global name system with a personal name system, enabling users to build personal administrative groups easily and intuitively, to establish secure bindings between his devices and with other users' devices, and to name his devices and his friends much like using a cell phone's address book. To connect personal devices reliably, even while mobile, behind NATs or firewalls, or connected via isolated ad hoc networks, UIA gives each device a persistent, location-independent identity, and builds an overlay routing service atop IP to resolve and route among these identities. Finally, to support today's interactive applications built using concurrent transactions and delay-sensitive media streams, UIA introduces a new structured stream transport abstraction, which solves the efficiency and responsiveness problems of TCP streams and the functionality limitations of UDP datagrams. Preliminary protocol designs and implementations demonstrate UIA's features and benefits. A personal naming prototype supports easy and portable group management, allowing use of personal names alongside global names in unmodified Internet applications. A prototype overlay router leverages the naming layer's social network to provide efficient ad hoc connectivity in restricted but important common-case scenarios.(cont) Simulations of more general routing protocols--one inspired by distributed hash tables, one based on recent compact routing theory--explore promising generalizations to UIA's overlay routing. A library-based prototype of UIA's structured stream transport enables incremental deployment in either OS infrastructure or applications, and demonstrates the responsiveness benefits of the new transport abstraction via dynamic prioritization of interactive web downloads. Finally, an exposition and experimental evaluation of NAT traversal techniques provides insight into routing optimizations useful in UIA and elsewhere.by Bryan Alexander Ford.Ph.D