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Economics and Policy Research

CAIDA's Internet policy research tries to address the issues of economics, ownership, and trust which create obstacles to progress on most of the top problems of the Internet.

Ongoing Research

We analyzed the reputation of a country's Internet (IPv4) addresses by examining the number of blacklisted IPv4 addresses that geolocate to a given country. We compared this indicator with two qualitative measures of each country's governance. We found a correlation exists between perceived corruption and fraction of blacklisted IP addresses.

As economic pressure imposed by IPv4 address exhaustion has grown, we seek methods to track deployment of IPv6, IPv4's designated successor. We examine per-country allocation and deployment rates through the lens of the annual "Day in the Life of the Internet" (DITL) snapshots collected at the DNS roots by the DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) from 2009 to 2014.


Publications


Previous Research

Despite much recent interest in the economic aspects of the Internet, such as network interconnection (peering), pricing, performance, and the profitability of various network types, two historical developments contribute to a persistent disconnect between economic models and actual operational practices on the Internet. The problem of studying interconnection economics is fundamental, and familiar: simple models are not valid, and complex models cannot be validated. We began a project to pursue transformative progress in both dimensions: creating more powerful, empirically parameterized computational tools, and enabling broader validation than previously possible.

COMMONS

CAIDA proposes an experiment: the Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (COMMONS) project, which aims 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.

In 2007, a paper enttiled The (un)Economic Internet? was published in IEEE's Internet Computing, discussing the impact of economic and policy issues to the Internet as critical infrastructure.

The worldwide distribution of Internet resources and address space is highly non-uniform. With BGP Geopolitical Analysis, we present an analysis comparing five demographic measures against three measures of Internet resources, stratified by continent with substratification by country. IPv6 Geopolitical Analysis is also available covering distribution of IPv6 addresses.


Additional Content

Dataset Comparison: IPv4 vs IPv6 traffic seen at the DNS Root Servers

We seek to track deployment of IPv6, IPv4’s successor. We examine per-country allocation and deployment rates through the annual “Day in the Life of the Internet” (DITL) snapshots collected at the DNS roots by the DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) from 2009 to 2014.

Correlation between country governance regimes and the reputation of their Internet (IP) address allocations

We analyzed the reputation of a country’s Internet (IPv4) addresses by examining the number of blacklisted IPv4 addresses that geolocate to a given country. Our data confirms that countries with more democratic governmental institutions harbor a smaller fraction of blacklisted hosts.

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