On Sunday, Nate Anderson of Ars Technica skewers a recurring myth about the Internet’s inevitable demise. The story — as often told by telco-operatives — goes something like this:

The Internet will come crashing down around the year 2010. The reason: Dastardly Net users are taxing it to the limit – sharing videos and other rich media files at a skyrocketing pace. Net Neutrality will unleash this unruly mass of Web users upon the Internet grinding it to a halt.

The term used to describe this unholy Armageddon is the “exaflood” and if you’re to believe some we’re already teetering on the brink of network extinction — that is unless we allow network operators to have their way “shaping” Internet content.

“As traffic increases on the Internet, ISPs and content owners have shown increased interest in blocking, throttling, or limiting it for different reasons,” Anderson writes.

This issue of traffic increases has a direct bearing on Net Neutrality, he adds. It’s therefore important to consider questions about the supposed threat “with a solid factual basis.”

For answers Anderson turns to Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota’s Digital Technology Center. Odlyzko’s data show some interesting trends, which thoroughly debunks the scare tactics of the Net doomsayers.

According to Odlyzko, the rate of Internet traffic growth has been slowing down over the last five to six years — and not rising at an unmanageable rate as has been predicted by Net Neutrality opponents.

Odlyzko also notes that the growth rate of peer-to-peer file sharing is about 100 percent a year. Compare that to the dire predictions many industry apologists made before the FCC in Boston.

“We concluded that the fear-mongering imagery of a ‘flood’ was overblown and unhelpful to rational debate,” wrote Nate.

Odlyzko reports that traffic growth is more akin to a gale than a hurricane. “With a gale, you shorten your sails and you can still steer to some extent.”

While the Internet backbone has plenty of capacity, the problem exists at the last mile, where network operators are reluctant to expand their pipes to meet a steadily growing consumer demand.

In a marketplace controlled by the few, the free-market rule about building supply to satisfy demand seems no longer to apply.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.-->