The materials collected here are products of an intersection of extensive experience designing, building, managing, and observing domestic international IP networks in many countries, with a broad but diverse background in academic and public policy-oriented R&D in the areas of international economic and monetary affairs, “foreign” policy, and telecommunications.


While some material may seem abstract or theoretical, everything here is an outgrowth of, or attempt to communicate to diverse audiences, a few basic and eminently practical, action-oriented observations:

An evolving pragmatic research agenda...

  1. 3.Both of these propositions are grounded in, and empirically supported by the basic economic insight that unique public IP addresses, as the divisible, outward-facing, and publicly observable features of the Internet’s core protocols, constitute a global-scope technical medium of exchange for packetized information, products and services.

  1. 1.For the last decade or longer, the evolving global distribution of Internet resources -- i.e., of Internet users, uses (content and services), and usage -- has been an artifact of enterprise-level competitive dynamics that are very similar to the national-level dynamics described by Adam Smith in 1776. Economies that provide an open, supportive environment for the emergence and interaction of network enterprises tend to develop faster, and to support more domestic and cross-border Internet production and service delivery than they forego to the cross-border Internet production of enterprises from other “network economies”.

  1. 2.Given the right technical, economic, and institutional environment, Internet development is everywhere a natural, spontaneous, organic phenomenon. Absent the right conditions, however, the application of local ingenuity, creativity, and effort that are the natural engines of Internet development will either be frustrated, or its results will be displaced to other, more hospitable environments. The key to promoting local Internet development is thus a matter of eliminating various technical, economic, and institutional bottlenecks.