Tom Vest, M.A.

The article The Future of the Internet: In a decade, the Net will dig deeper into our lives said

The future direction of the Internet could end up being one in which the telecom carriers apply their own business model to the Net — one that CAIDA senior analyst for economics and policy Tom Vest calls “telcotopia” — which would basically mean a return to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), where no network service is possible outside of an explicit partnership with the regional or national PSTN owner. In another scenario, the Internet could become a government-run utility, whereby network control ceases to be a strategic business advantage. Finally, the “let a hundred flowers bloom” approach could be adopted, in which many different infrastructure control arrangements and business models compete and coexist.

Tom Vest, M.A. is Senior Analyst for Economics and Policy at CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the University of California’s San Diego Supercomputer Center. His research interests include the determinants of Internet growth, the impact of varying institutional and regulatory environments on Internet development, and the evolutionary economics of Internet service provision. He is an ABD doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, where he focused on international trade and monetary relations and international telecommunications policy.
 
Tom is also Research Program Manager at Packet Clearing House where he designs, coordinates, and conducts various research projects related to Internet protocols, operations, and infrastructure. He is also Co-Principal Investigator of the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) funded effort to support network operations-relevant security capacity-building research.
 
He authored Toward an Empirical Network Macro-economics, An Empirical Foundation for Normative Internet Policy, IP Address Allocation vs. Internet Production I: Understanding the Relationship, and the Differences, and Costs and Benefits of Running a National ARD: China’s Footprint on the Internet Routing Table.
 
Tom earned a B.S. in East Asian Studies from the University of Virginia in 1990, a M.A. in International Political Economy from the University of Southern California in 1997, and has a Ph.D. pending (ABD) in International Relations at the University of Southern California.
 
Watch his presentation The Wealth of Networks! Read his LinkedIn profile.