Internet science: A manifesto

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new emerging science: Internet science. This paper argues that current Internet is a direct by-product of Shannon´s Information theory and its master thesis. After that I attempt a general and generic definition of a network and discuss the different alternatives. This discussion results in defining a network as a set of distributed actors cooperating for exchanging information. Based on this definition, I describe how cooperation in networks happens at two conceptual levels: on the structure and the growth of the network and on the information exchange (or forwarding). After describing a potential approach to understand the growth of a network as resulting from an iterative prisoners´ dilemma game, I explained how forwarding cooperation can be divided into three classes: full cooperation, selfishness and nonrational cases. This discussion opens a discussion on the need to develop a new economical theory for understanding networks and information exchange.