The information superhighway is a revolution that in years to come will transcend newspapers, radio, and television as an information source. Therefore, I think this is the time to put some restrictions on it.- U.S. Senator James Exon (reported by Peter Lewis in the New York Times)
The net interprets Congress as system damage and routes around it.- Jeanne A. E. DeVoto
Over the past decade, the internet has become something that every lawmaker has an opinion on. Attempts to control it have come from all quarters - legal, technical, mathematical, and rhetorical. We have seen various legislative bodies try to assert control over what crosses the wires via a number of laws, all of them much derided by the internet's freedom fighters and a loose coalition of outraged technologists. Has it all been for nought? From a free-speech perspective, much is certainly at stake, and battles of genuine importance have been lost and won. But how is the medium itself holding up under this assault? Is the internet really routing around censorship as if it were damage, or are these legal wranglings actually damaging the stability of the network?
I would like to find out if there is any correlation between legislative events and network state. Much has been talked about recent legislation's effects on people in terms of chilled speech and prior restraint, but very little has been done to figure out if any of the laws that have been passed in the past decade have any actual effect on the international internet. Figuring out the effects of legislation should be quite interesting, and is one of a select few research projects in which the null hypothesis is perhaps even more intriguing than discovering a correlation at all.
There are three main challenges to this project:
- How do we define what an effect on the internet is?
- What metrics should we use?
- Where can the data be found?
Defining internet level effects is tricky, but can probably best be
approached by restricting ourselves to measuring interdomain routing -- the
concept that really strikes at the very core of what the internet is. Although
it has been said that [d]escribing the Internet as the Network of Networks
is like calling the Space Shuttle a thing that flies
(John Lester),
interdomain routing and survivability are the core ideas behind the creation of
the internet. If legislation is negatively affecting any of these attributes,
then we need to know about it as soon as possible.
I propose looking at three main metrics - average diameter, average route duration, and international connectivity. These should supply a rough view of the state of the network without drowning the viewer in data. Getting the data, however, is a whole other story. Fortunately, the Route Views project has terabytes of routing table archives, and the Packet Clearing House has chosen to make their internet topology measurements available as well. Both sites have data going back through 1997, enabling the study of seven full years of internet topology changes, in which time many legislative events of significance have occurred. These events include, but are not limited to, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the USAPATRIOT Act, the CAN-SPAM Act, September 11th (the net's reaction to this was studied by Eisenberg et al.), as well as several important judicial decisions relating to free speech and cryptography on the internet.
As Floyd and Paxon noted in 1999, we don't really know how to model the internet. So predicting whether or not legislation will affect the internet was an impossible chore. Now that we have some data, however, it seems that the time is ripe to analyze it in an effort to ensure we don't legislate away the robustness or interconnectedness of this incredibly important tool.
