7 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 293 2018 that some of these behaviors may be hard to detect, and under other circumstances might be considered as criminal activities or cyber- warfare. So what does this mean in practice for the R&E community? I’ll look at three situations: what it means on campus, what it means for R&E community members using networked resources at home, and what it means for smaller content providers that may be important to the R&E community. The Impact on Campus Universities, major corporations, government research labs, and other organizations negotiate for their commercial internet access wholesale in a very competitive market. In addition, they often use Internet2’s backbone, perhaps through a regional optical network (RON) that is typically controlled by and accountable to the R&E community, to carry traffic to other members of the R&E community. It seems unlikely that any of these networks will indulge in the sort of bad practices that the elimination of net neutrality enables such practices can be explicitly prohibited in contracts, and the highly competitive marketplace for the most part ensures that there won’t be a problem. And certainly the R&E RONs and Internet2 are not going to engage in this sort of bad behavior. What this means is that the elimination of net neutrality is going to have very little effect indeed on organization-to-organization operations within the R&E community (and indeed well beyond— traffic to almost any large organization, including commercial and government sites should see little change). Note also that institutions with international campuses or other facilities are unlikely to see much impact from this decision, as it only covers US ISPs. Reaching Members of the R&E Community at Home R&E institutions frequently need to reach people at home who are connected through ISPs that service consumers—typically
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