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Home > Science Magazine > 2 December 2011 > Palfrey et al. , 334 (6060): 1210-1211

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Science 2 December 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6060 pp. 1210-1211 DOI: 10.1126/science.1210737
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INFORMATION SCIENCE

Better Data for a Better Internet

John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain *
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* Author for correspondence. E-mail: zittrain@law .harvard.edu When people took to the streets across the UK in the summer of 2011, the Prime Minister suggested restricting access to digital and social media in order to limit their use in organizing. The resulting debate complemented speculation on the effects of social media in the Arab Spring and the widespread critique of President Mubarak's decision to shut off the Internet and mobile phone systems completely in Egypt (see the photo). Decisions about when and how to regulate activities online will have a profound societal impact. Debates underlying such decisions touch upon fundamental problems related to economics, free expression, and privacy. Their outcomes will influence the structure of the Internet, how data can flow across it, and who will pay to build and maintain it. Most striking about these debates are the paucity of data available to guide policy and the extent to which policy-makers ignore the good data we do have.

Data-Poor Decisions, or None at All?

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Web sites and Internet service providers collect statistics about seemingly every aspect of Web usage throughout the commercial world. Companies collect so much information about how individual people use the Internet that we are seeing a growing backlash, in the name of user privacy, against corporate data collection (1). Yet at a systemic level, we understand little about what's going on in the digital world in the ways that should matter most to policy-makers. Policy-making is based, too often, on anecdotes collected at random (or worse, self-servingly) or on research produced or funded in ways that call into doubt its scholarly integrity. Examples of this uninformed policy-making abound. Data that for decades have driven much policy-making on broadband have been funded and collected by the providers of telecommunications services themselves (2). Although industry involvement in research can be helpful, policy-makers need independently collected and vetted data on which to base their decisions. In matters of child safety, most decision-making has been driven by fear about what kids might be doing online, not data about what they are in fact doing online (3). The largely ineffective regime of protecting online privacy in the United States, based on an incomplete understanding of youth practices in particular, demonstrates this point. Social networking. In downtown Cairo at El Tahrir square, a large crowd with handheld devices communicates what's happening on the ground using social networks like Twitter and Facebook
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Rather than make decisions based on bad information, states might hold off from regulating the Internet for the time being, continuing the laissez-faire approach that has predominated in many jurisdictions from the 1960s to the mid-1990s (4). There are attractive elements to such cyber-libertarianism: Innovation has flourished in the digital world (5). Such a pure wait-and-see approach to forging public rules that affect the Internet and its impact on society is nonetheless risky. A complete vacuum of public involvement can in some circumstances give rise to private, less accountable regulation. It is unwise to assume that there is no need to regulate harms that occur online, even as authorities pursue harms done offline.

New Metrics for Better Policy

The best approach is neither to make ill-informed decisions based on too little data nor to avoid state regulation simply because of the absence of decent data. Instead, we should begin a concerted push for highly reliable and publicly available forms of measurement of the Internet and the Web and how we use them, including the flows of information we generate and consume. Better data would do more than just help the state meet its regulatory obligations; better data would also improve self-regulation by private sector players and empower individuals to make better decisions. In the meantime, we as researchers need to work harder to translate the good data that we do have into terms that can directly inform policy-making. First, we need to know more about the architecture of the network and how it is changing. For example, is the Web becoming more or less centralized over time? How much are unrelated content and services converging to common hosting within a comparative handful of cloud providers? This is an area where researchers have collected a great deal of data, but we have yet to connect and translate these data consistently for policy-makers and the public. Second, we need to know more about how information flows or stutters across the network. Where are there blockages? From what sources do they arise? And third, we need to know more about human practices in these digitally mediated environments.

Measuring the Network Itself

The Internet is a global network of networks. It is extremely dynamic, even unstable in its shape, so debates about network neutrality and Internet governance are too easily overtaken, or unduly influenced, by events. We need enhanced systems of measurement to tell us how the network is functioning today and the means to model the future impact of new rules on network functionality. The data that inform telecommunications debates are complicated and conflicting, even when it comes to answering incredibly basic questions of media and network access like penetration, speed, and price (2). There are pockets of such independent research already, some of which are excellent. The field of Web Science is yielding important work. The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis has developed data on the structure of the Internet and the autonomous systems it comprises. The Internet Software Consortium has produced helpful software tools for measuring important kinds of activity on the Internet. Firms like Arbor Networks produce reports about security on the Internet and the effects of large-scale policy shifts, like plans to switch to Internet protocol version six. But even these data, stronger than what exists in other areas of study of the network, are only snapshots of fragments, glimpses of particular narrow aspects of the network, at particular moments in time. We need to be able to stitch these fragments together, to render them interoperable, and to fill in the gaps between them. In order to have a more complete and dynamic picture, we need to identify public way-stations on the network that transparently monitor usageanonymized, so as not to exacerbate the growing problem of privacy on the Internetand report statistics to a common, open source for all to analyze. By analogy, we have come to understand malware (malicious software) much better thanks to the company McAfee's reports based on millions of data points generated through their popular antivirus software. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Internet Traffic Analysis Study, to which the Internet provider company Comcast contributes data, is another positive example. A coordinated, cooperative effort among corporations that own and manage key parts of the network, researchers who are devoted to collecting and sharing these data with the public, and a community of participants around the world could produce a consistent flow of useful data. A few million dollars' worth of research infrastructure could help prevent billion-dollar policy mistakes.

Measuring How Data Flow (or Don't)

Information flows across the Internet and Web in ways that vary from one geographic region to another. Sometimes that inconsistency has to do with architectural decisions or choices made by network operators. One piece of this puzzle that we now better understand is Internet censorship. Through a multi-institutional research program called the OpenNet Initiative, we have shown when and how states block access to certain Web sites (6, 7). However, this method of studying Internet censorship also suffers from the snapshot problem; for most testing, we need a person on the ground in a particular state at a specific moment in time. To help fill in the picture, we have asked the public at large to get involved. The experimental research platform
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Herdict (8) exemplifies this approach. Instead of relying on researchers to test at a given moment, Herdict allows anyone to report Web censorship anywhere around the world at any time. The system then aggregates responses from the crowd. The crowd has helped to map the first incidence of Web blocking in Guatemala and to flag the blocking of Facebook in Egyptjust before Internet connectivity was completely cut off. The combination of expert researchers with specially tailored methodologies and the crowd's ongoing monitoring improves the picture of Web-based censorship. The addition of data from companies that either participate in censorship or come to observe it could further fill out the picture.

Measuring How We Use the Network

We need to commit to long-term longitudinal studies of how digitally mediated communications are changing behavior. These studies matter to pending debates over policy in every state in the networked world, especially those with populations that are just coming online in large numbers. For example, discussion in the United States over whether or not to amend the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which is intended to protect children under 13 from risks to their privacy, is poorly informed. We are not yet good at asking whether children are, in fact, better off by virtue of COPPA's enactment nor at employing social science data to help answer the question. Studies by the Pew Internet and American Life project and ethnographic work of the sort pioneered by Danah Boyd get too little attention in policy-making discussions about education policy, child safety, and privacy regulations. The result is likely both over- and underregulation. We also need to develop new ways to take stock of the activities that are occurring in relatively closed social environments, like Facebook or LiveJournal and Vkonkatke without violating user privacy. What's needed is commitment to a systematic, longitudinal study of particular user behavior, such as disclosure of personally identifiable information, and translation of these data into better policy-making and consumer-facing technology design.

Research Methods of Engagement

To solve these hard research problems, we will need to be more ambitious in our development of new research methods. Hard methodological questions include how to correlate results collected in a highly distributed manner with a high degree of accuracy. Suggestions from the crowd might serve as hypotheses, automatically fed back into systems that in turn test them and release the results openly, creating a feedback loop. This work will require a great deal of experimentation; partnerships between government, industry, and academics; interdisciplinary approaches; and broadly open minds. There are now dozens of institutions, including the Oxford Internet Institute and University of Southampton Web Science Doctoral Training Centre, that are pioneering research on both the technological and social aspects of the Web. The Web Science Trust has begun to articulate and fund the Web Science (9) research agenda, most recently asserting the importance of Open Data (10). The best research in this field will at once describe the Internet and actively shape its evolution by creating new technical tools, informing Internet users, and shaping government policy and industry practice. If the information can be collected dynamically and in collaboration with the wired population and then released back into the population for additional feedback and follow up, the resulting data and technological tools developed alongside it will be of more utility and relevance than information held close within the academy or industry. We ought to be able to pull data from within online walled-gardens and find new shared metrics for engagement and user activity that apply across platforms to have a more holistic view of the Internet. These methods will enable us to make better policy as the importance of digitally mediated technologies grows. That is, of course, if policy-makers in turn can trust the data we collect and rely upon it when making the crucial decisions before them.

References and Notes

1. Consider the class-action lawsuits filed by Internet users against Google for the Buzz product and Facebook for its Beacon product, each of which resulted in settlements of about U.S.$8 million. 2. Y. Benkler, Next Generation Connectivity (Berkman Center, Cambridge, MA, 2009); http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/pubrelease/broadband/. 3. J. Palfrey et al., Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies (Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC, 2008). 4. The Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, Clinton Administration Interagency Working Group , clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/Commerce (1997). 5. V. Mayer-Schnberger, Science 325, 396 (2009). Abstract/FREE Full Text 6. R. Deibert et al., Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010). 7. OpenNet Initiative , www.opennet.net/. 8. HerdictWeb , www.herdict.org. 9. T. Berners-Lee, W. Hall, J. Hendler, N. Shadbolt, D. J. Weitzner, Science 313, 769 (2006).
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10. J. Taylor et al., Web Science Trust Review 2011 (Web Science Trust, London, 2011). Leave a comment (0)
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