Invisible Infrastructures: Understanding Autonomous Systems by Share Foundation

The Internet nowadays is an indispensabele and invisible infrastructure that provides us an unlimit opportunities. Due to its invisibility, it’s seldom discuss and people have limited knowledege about how they deal with our data or how those networks are interconnected, but these are actually significant aspects to understand.

In order to deal with these, they first understand the structure of our nearest network, which is owned and runed by tens of thousands of internet service provider (ISP). Because every device connecting to the internet has an IP address, which allows data to flow over the internet, they used IP ranges of ISPto create a Network Topology map for every of them.

In this case, there are more than 300,000 different IP addresses and links between huge sets of data. To visualize these, they used Gephi which is a platform able to display, manipulate and transform the network into a map. And this help them to obtain a form of 30 different maps of ISPs in Sebria. For each different structures, they can not only learn the network structure analysis, efficiency of the network and the aspect of each network security, but also private related misuse of the network, content control, and surveillance. And the three basic network structures are centralized, decentralized, and distributed.

However, their analysis is still based on an individual ISP, which is just a small fragment of the entirety. In order to create a more thorough pucture of the story and further understand more deeply, they will have to also examine local interconnectoins and links to the internationl networks.