Category Archives: Internet

Nicholas Economides, The Economics of the Internet Backbone (October 1, 2004). New York University School of Law. New York University Law and Economics Working Papers. Working Paper 4.

This paper discusses the economics of the Internet backbone. I discuss competition on the Internet backbone as well as relevant competition policy issues. In particular, I show how public protocols, ease of entry, very fast network expansion, connections by the same Internet Service Provider (“ISP”) to multiple backbones (ISP multi-homing), and connections by the same large web site to multiple ISPs (customer multi-homing enhance price competition and make it very unlikely that any firm providing Internet backbone connectivity would find it profitable to degrade or sever interconnection with other backbones in an attempt to monopolize the Internet backbone.

Place the State invites you to drop each state onto the map of the US, and tells you how close you got (each state is dropped on a blank map, you don't get your previous guesses to help you.)

Just less than half of my placements were close enough to count as fully correct. And, while most of my errors were fairly small, I learned that Arkansas is much further west than I knew.

Continuing on the theme of not-immediately-obvious ways in which the net moves information, have a look at Terra Nova: Automated Expertise Management. This tells the tale of Thottbot.com,

At first glance, Thottbot looks like a normal third-party MMORPG information site. Try searching for “Fiery Enchantments” – a lvl 42 quest in the game. Thottbot has the details of the quest stored. But imagine I just picked up this quest and I don't know where these “dragon whelps” are that drop the “black drake's heart”. If I follow the “black drake heart” link, Thottbot shows me all the mobs that drop it, their level ranges, and most importantly where to find them. Click on the “map” link next to the lvl 41 Scalding Whelp. Thottbot dynamically generates a map of the zone where these mobs are found and their spawn range. All items, quests, mobs and maps are cross-referenced in Thottbot.

Now, you might think that Thottbot has this information because of constant submissions from good-hearted players (which is how other sites do it), but that's not what's happening. There is a free custom GUI called Cosmos which allows customized toolbars as well as mods that add functionality. Of interest to us here is that Cosmos also sends information (optional) to the Thottbot database from every player who uses it. Every mob, item, quest and player character that is encountered has their stats and location tracked and sent to Thottbot automatically.

In other words, the expertise of individual players is automatically tracked, stored and shared by the system. More importantly, the aggregation of their expertise allows the discovery of what would otherwise be hard to know – the spawning ranges of mobs, the drop rates of rare and uncommon items, and so on.

It's not that hard to imagine how this gets generalized to other types of online activities within structured settings…maybe google searches, ebay bidding strategies, or comparative shopping. It's somewhat harder to see how this helps me outside structured action/query-response environments. But if it did…

Because I agreed to give a conference paper on the subject, I've been thinking a lot lately about the way the net moves information — and because I'm such a contrarian sometimes I've been led to think about ways in which the net-as-we-know it fails to move certain important types of information. My plan was to move on to thinking about what we could do about those failures.

Well, time out for a short-circuit as to at least one item on my list.

John Perry Barlow writes in BarlowFriendz: The Intimate Planet, about two lengthy Skype conversations with Asian women who picked him at random to practice their English.

There's lots of human interest in it all, but what really caught my eye was this:

The bottom line is this: they reached at random out into the Datacloud and found a real friend. And I feel like I have been graced with a real friend in both of them. Given the fact that I've been getting interesting messages from distant strangers since 1985, why do I think the big deal? Why is this different? Because these strangers have voices. There's a lot more emotional bandwidth in the human voice. I'm always surprised by the Meatspace version of someone I've only encountered in ASCII. I'm rarely surprised by someone I've only met on the phone. But one doesn't get random phone calls from Viet Nam or China, or at least one never could before.Skype changes all that. Now anybody can talk to anybody, anywhere. At zero cost. This changes everything. When we can talk, really talk, to one another, we can connect at the heart.

The potential of establishing a real emotional connection is exponentially advantaged. And I honestly don't think it would have been any different had they been guys. In the days since, I've received another random call from a guy in Australia. We talked, very entertainingly, for awhile. I'm glad to know him too. (He wasn't trying to practice his English. He actually seems to prefer his version. He was just doing it because he could.)

..

Anyway, I feel as if the Global Village became real to me that night, and, indeed, it has become the Global Dinner Party. All at once. The small world has become the intimate world.

I'm beginning to think this Internet thing may turn out to be emotionally important after all.

Lots to think about. And although it doesn't leverage easily into conversations about governance as such, it may be another step towards creating necessary preconditions for interesting things.

A spammer is forging my address in the 'from' line of his spam. As a result, my email address is being blacklisted in some places, and I've received about a thousand bounce messages in the last hour.

For the life of me, I can't think what to do about it….

Update: From a first look, the mail is coming from 80.225.253.178 (for which there is no meaningful whois contact data) and it's advertising a web site owned by this owner:

Domain ID:D9457357-LRMS
Domain Name:PINOMEDS.INFO
Created On:22-Jan-2005 14:49:19 UTC
Last Updated On:22-Jan-2005 17:02:21 UTC
Expiration Date:22-Jan-2006 14:49:19 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:R139-LRMS
Status:ACTIVE
Status:OK
Registrant ID:C8594388-LRMS
Registrant Name:Ms. Alexandrina Sirakova
Registrant Organization:V+D Auto GmbH
Registrant Street1:Postfach 25 Sofia
Registrant City:Sofia
Registrant State/Province:na
Registrant Postal Code:BG-1407
Registrant Country:BG
Registrant Phone:+3.5928614244
Registrant FAX:+3.5928614244
Registrant Email:lora_2005@inorbit.com
Admin ID:C8594388-LRMS
Admin Name:Ms. Alexandrina Sirakova
Admin Organization:V+D Auto GmbH
Admin Street1:Postfach 25 Sofia
Admin City:Sofia
Admin State/Province:na
Admin Postal Code:BG-1407
Admin Country:BG
Admin Phone:+3.5928614244
Admin Email:lora_2005@inorbit.com
Billing ID:C8594388-LRMS
Billing Name:Ms. Alexandrina Sirakova
Billing Organization:V+D Auto GmbH
Billing Street1:Postfach 25 Sofia
Billing City:Sofia
Billing State/Province:na
Billing Postal Code:BG-1407
Billing Country:BG
Billing Phone:+3.5928614244
Billing Email:lora_2005@inorbit.com
Tech ID:C8594388-LRMS
Tech Name:Ms. Alexandrina Sirakova
Tech Organization:V+D Auto GmbH
Tech Street1:Postfach 25 Sofia
Tech City:Sofia
Tech State/Province:na
Tech Postal Code:BG-1407
Tech Country:BG
Tech Phone:+3.5928614244
Tech Email:lora_2005@inorbit.com
Name Server:NS2.PINOMEDS.INFO
Name Server:NS1.PINOMEDS.INFO

But that doesn't really help much…

Second Update: the flood has stopped, or something upstream of me has stopped it.

Third update: Not. Getting. Any. Mail.

Fourth update (@ 11:30pm, which is to say several hours later): New mail is now getting through. No idea what happend to any mail sent in last four hours or so except that I didn't get it.

Search guru John Battelle thinks Google has just undergone a major mutation, but I'm not so sure I agree. Here's his case:

John Battelle's Searchblog: Print Implications: Google As Builder— Google was born of, by, and in the web, as an extremely clever algorithm which noticed the relationships between links, and exploited those relationships to create a ranking system which brought order and relevance to the web. Google's job was not to build the web, its job was to organize it and make it accessible to us.

But all this new Print material, well, it's never been on the web before. It's Google who is actively bringing it to us. How, therefore, does Google rank it, make it visible, surface it, and..importantly…monetize it? If a philanthropist were to drop the entire contents of the Library of Congress onto the web, Google would ultimately index it, and as folks linked to the content, that content would rise and fall as a natural extension of everything else on the web. But in this case, Google itself is adding content to the web, and is itself surfacing the content based on keywords we enter. This is a new role – one of active creator, rather than passive indexer.

This means, in short, that Google is making editorial decisions about how to surface this new content, decisions it can't claim are based on the founding principle of its mission – PageRank.

I dunno. Seems to me that the essence of Google was indeed delegating the ranking of importance to others, and free riding on the decisions made by others to put stuff on line. PageRank was just a tool to achieve those ends.

Now Google has in effect become a subcontractor to libraries who will be deciding what to put on line from their collections. It's still the library's decision, Google is just providing technical help (and getting paid for it, I'd imagine?).

As Battelle notes “Google has announced that the results will be included in the index, not separated out in a vertical book search engine.” There is an issue as to how the stuff is ranked at first, although Google Scholar gives us some hints. Over time, it gets linked to like everything else and it seems to me the problem shrinks, no?