Technical Report NWU - EECS - 08 - 15 July 12 , 2008 Internet Politics : Resist , Die , or Exploit ?

In this paper, we disclose and explain Internet politics, an “invisible hand” that inherently affects Internet research. We show that it could cause significant underutilization of constructive research ideas and a vicious cycle of bias in mainstream research ideas. However, we also expose that it is possible to gradually alleviate effects of the Internet politics by well understanding it. To this end, we propose Internet politics analysis, a systematic approach that can potentially well address the research dilemmas caused by the Internet politics. In addition, we propose a simple but effective model for the Internet politics which can significantly facilitate the Internet politics analysis. As a result, it may lead to dramatic gains for the future Internet research.