Reclaiming the Internet with distributed architectures: rights, technologies, practices, innovation

The final symposium of ADAM – Distributed Architecture and Multimedia Applications, which took place on October 2nd and 3rd, 2014, at the École des Mines, was designed to invite researchers in information and communication sciences, in economics, law, network engineering and in Sciences and Technology Studies to join the ADAM Final symposium ADAMproject research team and contribute to a reflection on the reappropriations of the Internet and the uses of distributed architectures.

The research project ADAM, coordinated by Cécile Méadel, gathered researchers from CSI (Mines ParisTech), the Centre for the Study of Administrative and Political Science (CERSA – CNRS), from the Co-Design Lab of the Telecom ParisTech Department of Social and Economic Sciences (SES) and the Telecom ParisTech Department of Computer and Networks science (INFRES) in the optic to study the technical political, social, socio-cultural and legal implications of the distributed networks’ architectures.

models, the rights and the norms these developments lead to experiment and to test with the practical functioning of the networks.

At the closing of the project, the research team wished to organize the discussions on the uses of the distributed network architectures by focusing, with the contribution of the works of the other research teams, on the issue of the development of its uses in the perspective of reclaiming the control over Internet services and to revert to the original organization of the cyberspace.

The characteristics of distributed architectures can be summarized in broad outline: the networks consist of multiple calculation units, which have the capacity to run services by sharing resources and tasks. This model of architecture tolerates failure in the individual knots that form the network. Therefore, since the network does not thus contain a unique point of failure, it has the capacity to adapt to a change of scale.

The developers’ or engineers’ choice to use this type of architecture rather than a more common model of centralized architecture to develop of on-line services has implications as much for the use of the services than for the rights of the Internet users. The investigations conducted within the framework of ADAM between 2011 and 2014 have led to identify and analyze the specific issues attached to the development of networks with distributed architectures, with respect to the uses, the production of contents, the dissemination of technologies, but also to the economic

You will find the communications discussed at the final symposium on the Dailymotion video channel dedicated to the project ADAM.