Warnings of ‘internet overload’
David Johnson June 18th, 2007
Prophets of doom have a good business, there is always something awful lurking around the corner and as our populations and cultures expand, things like greenhouse gasses, weather, and Web traffic get more complicated. Today’s sandwich board from the BBC has warnings of ‘internet overload’ scrawled on it. Many of us in the business are watching Net Neutrality, with more than passing interest. And if you have been in the business of managing servers, connectivity and telephony for more than a few years, you will know precisely what all this is about. E-mail is an easy example to grasp: The basic mail protocols were designed around shipping small text messages many years ago, and when we started moving rich format mail into more robust clients without building up the base platforms, mailservers started getting really grumpy a few years ago. Well, with today’s rich media content, we’re moving a lot more packets across the Internet today than we were back when Pine and Eudora ruled the pipes and the web was browsed in text with Lynx. “In one day, YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion e-mails; so it’s clearly very different,” said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems. The ‘Net’s spine was rebuilt mostly in the heady boom-and-bust days back in the 90s and hasn’t gotten an infrastructure boost in a long time. So, as they say, the end is near, but as this article notes… it was near last year, and the year before that, and so on. So when should users and publishers get seriously concerned?
6 Comments Add your own
1. Barney Lerten | June 18th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
As someone who nost must upload 150-megs from Bend, Oregon to a WorldNow server in NYC four times a day, as quickly as possible, and am seeing maddening fluctuations in the time it takes (zippy sometimes, crawl the next), I fear we’re already seeing the symptoms.
And as I try to get/keep one tech talking to another and not just pointing fingers or shrugging shoulders… I worry.
2. Steve Boriss | June 18th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
I would suggest that the time to begin worrying is when the government starts believing this issue is their business and takes the first step toward regulating the Internet. Regulation of speech would ultimately follow, just as it did in broadcast. We bloggers must fight Net Neutrality legislation very hard, or we will greatly regret it later. (Steve Boriss, TheFutureOfNews.com)
3. discreet_chaos | June 18th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Personally and I don’t know if this is part of Ron Paul’s or anybody’s platform, but I’ve long advocated using the Constitution’s guarantee of Post Offices as a foundation for a Constitutional Right to free broadband.
So, I guess that unlike the previous commenter and some others, I’d prefer more government involvement.
4. thedetroitchannel | June 18th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
we certainly don’t need the gov’t to make the internet better.
domain names are far too cheap. double the yearly reg fee, add more for icann (vs. the recent lowering of the change they collected from each reg), close the loop on “tasters” and a few other common sense items and there’d be $$$$ aplenty for added cap.
5. Dave | June 18th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Discreet,
Dr. Paul wants to legalize competition in first class mail (IE - the US Post Office).
He also refuses to regulate the internet in any way.
So, if you belive in a “right” to broadband, Ronny’s probably not your man.
6. discreet_chaos | June 18th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Dave - Thanks.
I realized after posting my comment that Paul’s Libertarianism would override his internetness and that it may have been something that I had extrapolated from Gravel’s advocacy of “internet voting” and “Government by Plebiscite”.
Nonetheless for years, I’ve advocated the idea that the same justifications the founders had for Constitutionally guaranteeing a Postal System should and would include broadband, along with phone service and cable.
The vast majority of these services are just a bunch of wires and I’m not saying that government should go into television production or providing any add-ons for the wires. I’m just saying that we should treat the “Information Superhighway”, the same as we treat the Interstate Highway System and use the equalizing force of government to bring these services to every household and hamlet.
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