The papers in the First Monday special issue "Reclaiming the Internet' with distributed architectures" were originally part of the final symposium of the research project ADAM (Architecture Distribuée & Applications Multimédias, French acronym of Distributed Architectures and Multimedia Applications). This introduction elaborates on the issues at stake in the study of distributed network architectures beyond engineering sciences; it explores their political, social and legal implications and shows, by introducing the papers, the important challenges distributed architectures pose to our societies, economic systems, legal norms and collective behaviors.

Contents

Introduction

Distributed architectures: Today and six years ago

Four areas of (cross-cutting) reflection on distributed architectures

Concluding remarks — Beyond ADAM: Present and (near-)future research on distributed architecture