The Internet has evolved into a critical communications infrastructure for society. Its core architecture wasn't designed for such extensive use. To maintain its robustness and stability, it is imperative to analyze its performance metrics. However, the empirical data required for such analysis is not accessible to researchers because of issues of Economics, Ownership and Trust (EOT).

Year after year, the scientific community has been given hundreds of millions of dollars to study the network. However, the data is held back as proprietary by the intermediaries such as Internet Service Providers (ISP) that participate in the network; the intermediaries fear competition and misuse of data. Some of the data isn't captured because of lack of economic incentive.

It is not just the scientific community that is affected. Even the policy makers' efforts are hamstrung due to the limitation of data access. Without such data, it is extremely difficult to make an informed opinion about the health and sustainability of this network. KC Claffy, the Principal Investigator and founder of Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), draws attention to the problems of the Internet.