I often hear laments about the lack of attention of policy-makers to disciplines such as communications, Internet studies, political science, and sociology. Indeed, often it is scholars and advocates arguing from an economic, engineering and law perspective, who are heard. In my view, these disciplines have an inherent “epistemic advantage” over others because one of their driving questions is how to improve (or even “optimize”) the working of a system, either analytically or by trial and error. A classic example is David Clark’s motto, articulated at an IETF conference in the early 1980s, calling upon the community of Internet engineers […]