68 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
68 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
# First-round investigation
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**Investigation date:** 2026-07-20
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**Canonical dataset:** 25 verified ecosystem-level entries in [`data/entities.csv`](../data/entities.csv)
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## Executive view
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The global Internet should not be modeled as one organization or one centrally owned network. It is better understood as several interdependent layers:
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1. **Identifiers and registries** — IANA, ICANN-related processes, the NRO, and five RIRs coordinate globally unique names, numbers, and protocol parameters.
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2. **Open technical standards** — IETF and W3C publish core protocol and Web standards, while ITU provides intergovernmental telecommunications standardization and coordination.
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3. **Distributed operations** — thousands of autonomous networks interconnect through private links and IXPs; PeeringDB, Euro-IX, and IX-F expose useful but participant-dependent views.
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4. **Naming infrastructure** — the DNS root is a globally distributed service with multiple independent operators; DNS-OARC provides an operational research community.
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5. **Physical transport** — terrestrial fiber, submarine cables, landing stations, facilities, spectrum, and power form a changing physical substrate. Round 1 identifies a discovery source, not a complete asset register.
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6. **Security and resilience** — routing norms, BGP collectors, RPKI/IRR systems, CSIRT communities, and operator groups provide overlapping coordination rather than a single control center.
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## Round-1 findings
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### 1. Build an “address book of authoritative directories” first
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Trying to list every network directly would become stale immediately. The scalable foundation is to map authoritative registries and maintained community datasets, then ingest or link to their records with provenance. The RIRs, PeeringDB, IX-F, FIRST, Root Server System, Route Views, and RIPE RIS are key anchor points.
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### 2. Governance, standards, ownership, and operation are different axes
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An organization can define a standard without operating infrastructure; register a resource without owning the underlying network; or operate a service without governing the global policy around it. Records therefore need functional categories and relationships, not a simplistic parent/child tree.
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### 3. Public datasets represent different kinds of truth
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- RIR registration data identifies registered resource holders and contacts, not necessarily current traffic operators or beneficial owners.
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- BGP collectors observe selected vantage points, not every path.
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- PeeringDB is maintained by participants and may be incomplete or temporarily stale.
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- Cable maps are discovery tools; ownership, operational state, and route details require corroboration.
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- CSIRT directories establish public identity and trust context, not permission to share sensitive data.
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### 4. Geographic language must describe service scope
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Headquarters location is often misleading. RIR regions, IXP associations, operator groups, and incident-response communities have specific service or membership boundaries. The dataset records service/community region separately from global/regional scope.
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### 5. The next useful unit is a relationship
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Future analysis should connect:
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- organization → autonomous system;
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- autonomous system → IP prefixes and RPKI objects;
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- network → IXP/facility/peering presence;
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- cable system → owner/operator/landing station/country;
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- DNS root identity → operator → sites;
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- CSIRT → constituency → country/sector;
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- source → claim → verification date.
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This graph should be derived from versioned source records rather than manually asserted as fact without evidence.
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## URL verification notes
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The official/canonical URLs in the dataset were checked with automated HTTP requests on 2026-07-20. Most returned successful responses. ICANN and NANOG returned HTTP 403 to the automated client while remaining canonical official links; this is recorded as a transport caveat. Packet Clearing House timed out during this pass and remains a round-2 lead rather than a canonical record.
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## Current limits
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- No country-by-country regulator or ministry directory yet.
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- No exhaustive ASN, ISP, cloud, CDN, carrier, IXP, facility, or cable inventory.
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- No graph database or automated ingestion yet.
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- No assessment of market concentration, dependency, geopolitical exposure, or outage risk.
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- No independent audit of every third-party dataset's completeness.
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## Conclusion
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Round 1 establishes a defensible navigation layer: 25 organizations, systems, and public directories spanning identifiers, standards, regional registries, DNS, interconnection, routing, physical transport, operator communities, and incident response. It is intentionally a map of where trustworthy investigation begins—not a claim that the world network has been fully enumerated.
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