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Document ActionsWhat We Don't Know...Up one levelA subfeed on Data Collection and Access to Data from our 'Commentary' section. This page pulls together aggregated blog posts from kc claffy, Susan Crawford, Rob Frieden, Ethan Zuckerman, and others. The dog that didn’t barkWith the help of Todd Hopfinger here at the University of Michigan, I’ve been trying to figure out the high-speed Internet access penetration story (numbers, speeds, costs) for Detroit, Pontiac, and Flint. I think it’swe’re on to quite an interesting tale, and I’ll cover it here as developments emerge. There is apparently no public data available [...] If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage ItThe following is an excerpt from a discussion forum for the Future of the Internet Workshop hosted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), entitled “If you Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It”. Tom Vest and KC Claffy, Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). 1. The Internet is now a critical [...] You go to war with the data you haveAcademic research, at its best, is about asking interesting questions and then designing experiments to answer them. One of the toughest challenges is designing experiments that are both possible and capable of answering the question at hand. The gap between the set of possible experiments and convincing experiments can sometimes be a vast one. Just like [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #3[beginning of top ten list] #3: Despite the methodological limitations of Internet science today, the few data points available suggest a dire picture: We’re running out of IPv4 addresseses that can be allocated (there are many allocated addresses that are not in observed use, but there is no policy support (yet) for reclamation or reuse), [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #1last 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 [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #8[beginning of top ten list] #8: The opaqueness of the infrastructure to empirical analysis has generated many problematic responses from rigidly circumscribed communities earnestly trying to get their jobs done. To its credit, the IETF acknowledged and endeavored to solve the technical limitations of the current IPv4 protocol, primarily the insufficient number of addresses and [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #4beginning of top ten list #4: The data dearth is not a new problem in the field; many public and private sector efforts have tried and failed to solve it. Information Sharing and Analysis Centers, such as those that exist for the financial services industry have been attempted several times, but there is no research [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #9k[beginning of top ten list] #9: The news is not all bad: there is a reason everyone wants to be connected to all the world’s knowledge — as well as each other — besides its status as the most powerful complex system ever created by man. The Internet’s [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #6[beginning of top ten list] #6: While the looming problems of the Internet indicate the need for a closer objective look, a growing number of segments of society have network measurement access to, and use, private network information on individuals for purposes we might not approve of if we knew how the data was being [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #7[beginning of top ten list] #7: The traditional mode of getting data from public infrastructures to inform policymaking — regulating its collection — is a quixotic path, since the government regulatory agencies have as much reason to be reluctant as providers regarding disclosure of how the Internet is engineered, used, and financed. For every [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #5[beginning of top ten list] #5: Thus the research community is in the absurd situation of not being able to do the most basic network research even on the networks established explicily to support academic network research. This inability to do research on our own research networks leads to unresolvable contradictions in our field of “science”, including [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #10[beginning of top ten list] #10: Moreover, even in the dim light of the underattended interdiscplinary research into the network, the available data implies clear directions for solutions, all of which cross policy-technology boundaries. We can learn from our mistakes. The false assumption that competing members of a profit-maximizing ecosystem will cooperate toward architectural innovations [...] top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #2[continued from yesterday] #2: Our scientific knowledge about the Internet is weak, and the obstacles to progress are primarily issues of economics, ownership, and trust (EOT), rather than technical. Economically, network research is perpetually behind network evolution — basic instrumentation can increase in cost 10X with one network upgrade, while network research budgets are [...] Towards the principles of open government dataThe goal of this weekend’s Open Government Principles workshop at O’Reilly and Associates was to draft a set of principles to define what constitutes open government data. The people drafting these principles were, for the most part, activists who believe that widespread sharing and creative presentation of government data can create a better-informed citizenry. In [...] renewing u.s. telecommunications researchas 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 [...] Lies, Damn Lies and Broadband StatisticsFor the better part of a decade, the United States lagged in broadband development largely because stakeholders invested in long haul capacity and failed local loop alternatives. Incumbent telephone company managers have emphasized regulatory uncertainty and “confiscatory” FCC sharing requirements, but the fact of the matter is that over $1 trillion was invested in the dotcom boom, a significant portion of which targeted burgeoning demand for local and long haul bandwidth. Now that regulatory uncertainty provides no explanation for the United State’s comparatively poor performance in broadband market penetration the federal government has started to shoot the messenger reporting continuing poor penetration rates. Both the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the State Department are challenging the statistics compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that ranks the U.S. 15th globally in broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants (down from 12th last year). See http://www.oecd.org/document/7/0,2340,en_2649_34223_38446855_1_1_1_1,00.html . The State Department has made the issue something of a diplomatic affront to the U.S. See http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/press/2007/State_OECD_042407.pdf NTIA offers explanations why scope of broadband access in places such as government offices and coffee shops means that the OECD ranking underestimates market penetration. See http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/press/2007/ICTleader_042407.html . So first stakeholders could blame the government for mandating common carriage facilities unbundling and interconnection. Now the government can blame outside data collectors as underestimating the kind of success the FCC found when it used zip codes as the relevant market penetration metric. I am confident U.S. broadband penetration statistics will improve, but the initial “success” will occur in urban areas with greater likelihood for more than two facilities-based carriers offering true broadband at rates below $60 a month. I fear the Digital Divide increasingly with cleve between cities and the hinterland. |
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