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Regulators are confronted with the fact that with the rapid pace of change and innovation on the Internet, regulatory initiatives are often rendered irrelevant almost as soon as they are proposed. How can regulators craft a durable approach that can remain relevant in this fast-changing environment? The authors propose a framework of platforms that Internet Service Providers may deploy, and discuss the regulatory implications for each type of platform. They demonstrate the utility of their approach by applying their model to the current policy problems raised by specialized services, minimum quality regulations, and structural separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Routing information through networks is a universal phenomenon in both natural and man-made complex systems. When each node has full knowledge of the global network connectivity, finding short communication paths is merely a matter of distributed computation. However, in many real networks, nodes communicate efficiently even without such global intelligence. Here, we show that the peculiar structural characteristics of many complex networks support efficient communication without global knowledge. We also describe a general mechanism that explains this connection between network structure and function. This mechanism relies on the presence of a metric space hidden behind an observable network. Our findings suggest that real networks in nature have underlying metric spaces that remain undiscovered. Their discovery should have practical applications in a wide range of areas where networks are used to model complex systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet Economics track will address how economic and policy issues relate to the emergence of the Internet as critical infrastructure. Here, the authors provide a historical overview of internetworking, identifying key transitions that have contributed to the Internet's development and penetration. Its core architecture wasn't designed to serve as critical communications infrastructure for society; rather, the infrastructure developed far beyond the expectations of the original funding agencies, architects, developers, and early users. The incongruence between the Internet's underlying architecture and society's current use and expectations of it means we can no longer study Internet technology in isolation from the political and economic context in which it is deployed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a packet network, the term bandwidth and throughput often characterize the amount of data that the network can transfer per unit of time. Bandwidth estimation is of interest to users wishing to optimize end-to-end transport performance, overlay network routing, and peer-to-peer file distribution. Techniques for accurate bandwidth estimation are also important for traffic engineering and capacity planning support. Existing bandwidth estimation tools measure one or more of three related metrics, capacity, available bandwidth, and bulk transfer capacity.