The importance of measurements for Internet policy

The Internet is more and more perceived as a critical infrastructure. Many governments are formulating policy on the "information society" in general and on the Internet in particular. However, in contrast with our growing interest for eAnything, our understanding of how the underlying Internet infrastructure really functions is lagging. This indicates that our society is becoming dependent of something that is not fully understood, let alone controlled. We show that gaining insight in the actual topology of the Internet is not only relevant to network engineers and researchers, but also to policy makers who seek to identify, understand and solve specific issues in the policy areas of fair competition, reliability and performance. In addition, we explain that the only reasonable way of obtaining the required insight is by means of Internet measurements and by inferring topology from these measurements.