The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web's meteoric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hindering both infrastructures---the Web is overly constrained by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened by the demands of the Web. There has been much commentary on this sad state-of-affairs, but dissolving the illfated union between DNS and the Web requires a new way to resolve Web references. To this end, this paper describes the design and implementation of Semantic Free Referencing (SFR), a reference resolution infrastructure based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).

brought together a group of knowledgeable and experienced participants, encompassing a broad range of perspectives, to explore key questions relating to Internet governance and regulation such as: • What policy issues are relevant to Internet governance and which, if any, require enhanced or new governance processes or structures? • How should the Internet be best steered in the future to sustain the continuing growth of Internet use? • Which governance models and institutions are likely to be most effective in balancing the different perspectives and interests of government, private enterprise and civil society to address global, regional and local needs? • What are appropriate models for Internet-related legislation and regulation and how best can wider policy implications be taken into account in developing appropriate Internet technology standards and protocols? • What forms of capacity building support should be prioritized to facilitate more effective governance of the Internet?

The financial success of online communities based on multiplayer game environments has been a bright spot among the many failures in electronic commerce initiatives. While this form of business has existed for less than a decade, it is growing rapidly and has become a mainstream form of entertainment in some areas of the world, such as Korea. Game environments are becoming more immersive and compelling and if this rate of improvement continues, such as through growing broadband penetration, they are likely to become as common as other forms of entertainment. This paper analyzes the issues facing developers of game communities in their goal of establishing viable business models.

economic and  public  policy  issues. The  SIEPR  Discussion  Paper  Series  reports  on  research  and  policy

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“[Telecommunications] should be universal, interdependent and intercommunicating, affording opportunity for any subscriber of any exchange to communicate with any other subscriber of any other exchange ” – Theodore Vail, AT&T President, 1907. “I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network – obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees – but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud...If someone wants to transmit a high quality service with no interruptions and ‘guaranteed this, guaranteed that’, they should be willing to pay for that...They shouldn't get on and expect a free ride. ” – Ed Whitacre, AT&T CEO, 2006. The past year witnessed an extraordinary event. An otherwise obscure telecommunications policy debate spilled outside the rarefied airs of Congressional Committees and the Federal Communications Commission’s eighth floor to rage across the Blogosphere, the

What is the relationship between market structure and innovative behavior in commercial computing and Internet markets? This broad question does not and cannot have a simple answer for at least two reasons. First, the core determinants of this relationship did not remain constant over several decades. Second, commercial

Every distributed system that employs linking requires a Reference Resolution Service (RRS) to convert link references to locations. We argue that the Web's use of DNS for this function is a bad idea. This paper discusses the nature, design, and use of a scalable and dynamic RRS. We make two principal arguments about the nature of reference resolution: first, that there should be a general-purpose application-independent substrate for reference resolution, and second that the references themselves should be unstructured and semantic-free.

this paper is to describe our design and implementation of a DHT-based RRS, called Semantic Free Referencing (SFR), that satisfies these three requirements, thereby providing a better RRS for the Web than DNS does currently. We will show that SFR permits functionality impossible in today 's Web and that what at first appear to be insurmountable challenges for SFR---performance, fate sharing, security, and convenient naming---actually have reasonable solutions

The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web’s meteoric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hindering both infrastructures—the Web is overly constrained by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened by the demands of the Web. There has been much commentary on this sad state-of-affairs, but dissolving the illfated union between DNS and the Web requires a new way to resolve Web references. To this end, this paper describes the design and implementation of Semantic Free Referencing (SFR), a reference resolution infrastructure based on distributed hash tables (DHTs). 1