Idea to Retire: Internet without policy metrics

[Commentary] Shortly after the Internet started as a node-neutral network of military computers, there were organizations dedicated to measuring network performance. One longstanding body doing this is the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego. Their efforts have been focused on collecting data from public nodes and information provided voluntarily by organizations with similar goals around the world. They have provided measurements of tremendous value to those concerned with tracking the growth and structure of the Internet. However, those measures do not tell us enough about the Internet, especially with regards to its enormous economic and strategic significance in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Since the mid-2000s, Internet exchanges, content delivery networks, and transit contracts undertaken by telecommunications operators have come to define the form of the Internet. The complex relationships between companies such as Google, Akamai, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and telecommunications companies bring together at times divergent interests that piece together the critical components for network operation. A simple table of metrics is needed that would allow anyone in the Internet-telecom sector to have a general sense of what is critical, growing, and changing. These requirements should not be dismissed because of company or governmental sensitivities. In the pharmaceuticals sector, companies hold many secrets but it is still possible to know the price of a medicine. In the automotive manufacturing sector it is possible to know the basic cost of a component, along with its input costs and output pricing. Unless we can devise appropriate means to measure, monitor and assess the Internet we put at risk many of the economic and public policy goals that we aspire to.

[Dr. Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood is a research fellow Oxford Brookes and ex-LSE, and holds wide experience in the telecommunications industry in the UK and the Netherlands. Jonathan Liebenau is a reader in technology management in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics.]