Recommended papers

This page is a collection of papers I recommend to people. I haven’t thought of a good organization for them.  See also my Group Forming Networks Resources page.

Others’ notes & papers

• John Jay Chapman, Commencement address A personal credo of mine.
• F.H. Clauser, Conservatives – quoted in Richard Rhodes’ Visions of Technology, about engineers’ propensity to “flinch” and “conjure up visions of a natural barrier” to progress where one may not exist.
• A Digital Bit – a nice set of very short briefings put out by Jay Kingley of Diamond Technology Partners on Digital Strategy. The January briefing introduces my model of economic scaling laws for communities of value, calling it Reed’s Law (it’s actually my 3rd Law). Other issues are: September, October, November (introduces communities of value concept), December (creating value in communities online), January (why community value creation becomes dominant).
• Paul Judge wrote Why the Long Wait? in the September 2000 issue of Fast Company highlighting my point that latency, not bandwidth, should be what users pay their ISPs for.
• Larry Lessig has written several articles recently linking policy issues to the End-to-end argument (see below).  The ones I’ve seen are all online-accessible.  They  include End Game in The New Republic, another called Innovation, Regulation and the Internet in The American Prospect, another called Architecting Innovation in The Industry Standard, and another in Time Magazine called ‘Will AOL own everything?’.
• Larry also recently held a very interesting conference called The Policy Implications of End-to-End at Stanford Law School on 12/1/2000 A paper with that title is available as The Policy Implications of End-to-End.
• The End-to-end argument was part of an ex parte brief by law professors Mark Lemley and Larry Lessig in the matter of AT&T’s acquisition of MediaOne, regarding cable open access.  Similarly, it was cited in Prof. Lessig’s expert report in the case brought by various record companies against Napster.

My notes & papers

• Reed’s Laws: Reed’s 1st Law on long-term data storage, Reed’s 2nd Law on communications. Reed’s 3rd Law, a scaling law for group communications is in the works(see Context article below). These laws are attempts to comment on how the information architecture of our world interacts with the people who inhabit it
• Saltzer, Reed, Clark, End-to-End Arguments in System Design. A fundamental principle that has guided the Internet.
• Saltzer, Reed, Clark, Source Routing for Campus-wide Internet. A paper that argues the scalability of source-routing for the Internet. Sadly, the idea persists only as a vestigial option in today’s IPv4; but the idea is central to the architecture of IPv6. Someday I’ll scan in the original protocol definition document for the protocol called DSP (Data Stream Protocol) that has a number of the ideas I brought to the IP design process back in the mid-’70’s.
• Reed, Saltzer, Clark, Active Networking and End-to-End Arguments. An update on the thinking in the end-to-end paper, specifically criticizing the “active networking” idea.
• Reed, Accounting in the Age of Moore’s Law. From Context Magazine Summer 1998. An article on why depreciation matters, and why it is different, in the digital world..
• Reed, Weapon of Math Destruction. From Context Magazine Spring 1999 – Suggests a new economic scaling law for communities of value beyond Metcalfe’s Law (value of a network of peers grows as N squared) that . See also the longer analysis in That Sneaky Exponential
• Reed, Going Nowhere Fast. From Context Magazine Summer 1999 – a brief rant on why bandwidth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  It’s the Latency, Stupid!
• David Weinberger (interviewing Reed),  Why group-forming matters. Appeared in 1/19/01 Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization
• Reed, The Law of the Pack. A short note on group-forming networks has been appeared in the Feb. 2000 issue of Harvard Business Review.
• Reed, Bluetoothless.  From Context Magazine Summer 2001 – a brief explanation of how Bluetooth missed its opportunity by ignoring the Internet and forming an unwieldy consortium.
• David Weinberger (interviewing Reed), The Myth of Interference. From Salon, 2003. My discussion about why radio “interference” doesn’t destroy information transmitted, so the basis of treating spectrum as exclusive property rights in regulation and law blocks the opportunity to create abundant wireless communications capacity. Instead, the idea of interference justifies creating an artificially scarce “economic input” called spectrum rights.
• Reed, comments on dockets 07-52 and 08-7, opening statement at FCC en banc hearing at Harvard Law School, February 25, 2008.