[Sosfbay-discuss] The End of the Internet?

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

End of the Internet predicted (again), film at 11.

Don't forget the principle, proven again and again,
The Internet Routes Around Damage, and its well known
corollary, Censorship is Just One More Kind of Damage.

When BBN was given the gravy boat to develop the
original Internet Protocols, one of the design goals
was that there be no single point of failure.
They may have sold the idea to Congress on the grounds
that the network was supposed to survive destruction
of peering points in war, but nobody inside was concerned
about that particular failure mode.  If a global war
takes out MAE-East, loss of Internet is the least of
your worries.

Microsoft dumping Internet Exploder and Outleak Express
on Netscape was gonna kill the Internet.
Moving the DNS governance from National Science Foundation
to Dept of Commerce was gonna kill the Internet.
As far as I'm concerned, Eternal September (if you don't
know what that is, google it) did more
damage than those events.  And the sudden broadband deployment
in South Korea was worse.  We've even survived the
fusion of spamming and cracking, and its rise as
a locus of international organized crime.

What's gonna end, and it *should*, is the bandwidth
is free party.  It turns out the economics of
long haul and edge bandwidth are really weird.
It costs about the same to lay a hundred optical
fibers from San Jose to Los Angeles as it costs
to lay one, and most of the existing fiber was laid
by Enron-type bubble companies which then collapsed.
So the fiber between cities is at 2% capacity
and depreciating.

But that doesn't mean bandwidth is free.  We're just
not paying for it right now.  (Routers and the staff
to manage them and the fortresses they live in
turn out to be the big cost.)  The telcos are locked
in a price war with the cable TV companies,
charging less than cost for residential broadband
and the network behind it.  They're looking for a
way to end that price war.  You're gonna have to
pay something approaching the cost for movie downloads
and podcasts and voice over IP.  Good.  It won't be
True Cost Pricing, but it will be more real than the
free bandwidth fantasy we're living in now.

Meanwhile, the really essential functions,
email and the text part of the Web, consume tiny
bandwidth, that can be supported by volunteers if need be.
Should the telcos take away the fat pipes,
independent skinny pipes will remain.
Should the DNS become discriminatory, the
alternative DNSes are ready to roll.  I'm more
worried about spam and malware and voluntary, stylish
stupidity chasing people away from email and the Web
than about any telco conspiracy.


Cameron