Exaflood Exaggeration
April 14th, 2008 by tkarrOn 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.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
[…] eArmageddon 15 April 08, 2:25 pm Filed under: internets, net neutrality Save the Internet: Internet Doomsday Debunked. No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI […]
April 15th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
WHY DO BROADBAND PROVIDERS CALL IT AN “EXAFLOOD” WHILE COMPETITORS CALL IT MORE BUSINESS?
Companies subject to effective competition don’t go around complaining about getting too much business in the form of “exafloods”. Instead, they’re usually delighted.
It’s not suprising that network monopolies and duopolies not subject to effective competition would attempt to exploit the extra business, since they’re already in the business of restricting output and raising price in the opposite direction of competitive companies.
The “exaflood” myth was an early talking point scripted by the public relations industry several years ago when developing the campaign against net neutrality - a phrase like “bandwidth hogs”, it’s designed to be catchy, understood and repeated often.
The objective is to characterize an “exaflood” as some impending “congestion collapse” from which the internet and its users must be protected by the wonders of a “free market” which is posed to self destruct and convert to totalitarianism if net neutrality prevails.
When challenged about the harms of net neutrality, its opponents fail to validate the claims. No, it doesn’t prevent the management of congestion, the setting of prices and TOS or the technical changes to allocate bandwidth to new applications like P2P. And it certainly doesn’t interfere with enforcing property rights to content or protecting the network from dangers such as hacker attacks.
Net neutrality is no more complicated and repressive than say, a speed limit, an age limit or a law that prevents race and gender discrimination when selling most any goods or services. It simply requires that internet content be treated equally on a level playing field in terms of access and provision by producers and consumers of content.
For example, if traffic is to be “prioritized”, it should be done by making available differences in bandwidth quality between the worst forms of congestion (subject to serious delays or interruption) and the most premium always-on bandwidth - open neutrally to any content that desires to use any particular bandwidth tier.
Opponents of net neutrality turn this proposition on its head by claiming falsely that the provider must control the priority of traffic at any given time based on how certain protocols and applications are tied technically to specific uses of internal bandwidth, but this doesn’t make sense.
Once those decisions are made, then content producers and consumers decide which quality bandwidth tier they want to use. If congestion occurs due to an “exaflood” or any other reason, the structure of the bandwidth tiers determines how it’s managed, with the premium tiers protected the most from congestion and the lowest quality tiers forced to endure it.
Meanwhile, don’t forget from an overall, longer run perspective, the providers have an incentive to restrict capacity and raise price, for example when Verizon lays fiber to the curb and then cuts the copper cable on the way out, even as Homeland Security preaches the virtues of redundant paths in networks.
Many different kinds of congestion and “exafloods” are neutrally managed and controlled and it’s not subjective, suppressive or otherwise difficult to define as claimed falsely by opponents of net neutrality.
Instead it’s a straightforward version of what’s found in competitive markets and that’s the problem - net neutrality stands in the way of access to enormous monopoly profits available to broadband providers through the non-neutral control of content.
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:17 am
Dear Senator Kerr-
I’m a constituent of yours from Newton, Massachusetts. I use the internet every day for business as well as to get my news. I no longer depend on TV or radio for news and commentary. Most TV and radio news available in the U.S. (with the possible exception of the BBC) seems to be contaminated by bias and corporate interests. If we allow the speed of internet access to be determined by the the content (e.g. corporate content valuable to the ISPs being fast, and non-profit or independent content being slow) then that is an effective chokehold on internet freedom of speech. The internet is the last media outlet where freedom of speech truly exists.
The argument that big media “owns the pipes” is ridiculous, since internet infrastructure is heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars. Allowing corporations
to choke access to certain content provides (those that do not provide extra profits to the ISPs on top of what customers are charged for service) would be a bit like allowing Walmart to block roads that do not lead to their stores. Is
that the kind of internet we want?