Early Internet Pioneer Claims The Internet Is Broken... But Oh Look, He's Selling The 'Solution'

from the marketers-dream dept

If I announced tomorrow that some key technology in widespread use today was fundamentally broken, but (oh yeah) that I was selling a solution that would fix it all, don't you think most reporters would first try to track down an independent third party to find out if what I was saying was actually true? Apparently not all reporters feel that way. So take it with a grain of salt when PC Authority writes a gushing article about how one of the internet's original designers, Larry Roberts, claims the internet is fundamentally broken. Roberts has been pushing this line for a while, and it's rather important to note that this is part of the marketing campaign for his company, which is trying to sell a "solution" to the problem. Yet PC Authority focuses entirely on the idea that the internet is broken, checks with no other third party, and only mentions at the very, very end of the article that Roberts' company just happens to be trying to sell a solution. Whether or not you believe Roberts' claims, you would think that a reporter wouldn't put what seems like a blatant press release and pitch it as a news article without at least getting some third party opinions.

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If You Must Dig Up A Highway... You Might As Well Install Infrastructure For Fiber Optic Cables

from the makes-sense dept

Wired broadband is often compared to the highway system, in that both are "natural monopolies" in that it often doesn't make sense to build competing setups, since you really only want one massive infrastructure product. With highways, you don't want to rip up too many parts of the country, and with broadband you don't want to let every company get rights of way to dig up everyone's yard. However, some politicians are pushing a rather simple, and totally reasonable plan that says if someone is already building or modifying a highway with federal funds, then they should also run conduit for fiber optic cables (they don't have to run the fiber themselves, just install the conduit). The idea -- and this makes a surprising amount of sense -- is that if the road is already being dug up, why not put conduit for future fiber there, rather than having to redig up areas to run fiber in the future. Sensible thinking from government officials? How much do you want to bet this goes nowhere?

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Sprint And Cogent Remind Us That The Internet Is Held Together With Handshakes And Duct Tape

from the peer-this dept

It seems that every few years we have some sort of story of a major internet provider cutting off another major internet provider over a disagreement concerning peering arrangements. More often than not, one of the companies involved in such disputes is Cogent, who seems to get on a lot of other firms nerves by (they claim) using more than their fair share. It's happening again, as Sprint has cut off Cogent, meaning that plenty of broadband users are having trouble reaching certain websites.

Every time this happens, it reminds us all how fragile the internet is, not because of any bandwidth crunch, but because the overall network really only works thanks to the fact that all of the big internet providers agree to share traffic across their networks through "peering" arrangements, some of which are more informal than others. The problem is that these peering arrangements are supposed to be just that: about "peers" agreeing to share traffic for the betterment of everyone. But, when you have a company like Cogent, who focuses on being just a dumb pipe that sells as much bandwidth as possible at very low levels, then the other peers start to feel that it's unfair. Cogent ends up dumping a lot more traffic on them than they do on Cogent. In this case, Sprint is claiming that Cogent failed to meet the terms of a signed agreement for peering, and has since refused to pay to keep connecting to its network, hence the shut off. Cogent, for its part, is using this mess as something of a PR opportunity, offering free internet connections to Sprint customers during this Sprint outage and saying that all other major carriers have full connectivity to Cogent.

In the end, like all of the other disputes, this one will get worked out and the internet will continue to function -- but it still is worrisome that much of the internet really is reliant on these companies agreeing to continue to play nice with each other.

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UN Agency Working On Tech Standards To Get Rid Of Anonymity

from the that-doesn't-seem-good dept

Declan McCullagh has a somewhat scary report about how the UN's International Telecommunication Union has been quietly working away on a proposal for new core internet technology that would allow a "traceback mechanism" to effectively get rid of anonymity, and allow those with access to identify who provided any particular piece of content. Not surprisingly, the proposal for such a technology was first suggested by a Chinese official, who has long tried to control the use of the internet in that country. The leaked documents related to this effort even indicate that one potential reason for such a mechanism would be to crack down on gov't opposition.

It is true that not everyone agrees that anonymity is a good thing, but it's taking it to another level to try to block out the possibility of anonymity altogether. While some are trying to position this as way to track down "bad" players (such as those running DoS attacks), the problem is that the definition of who's "bad" may depend heavily on who's in control. Regardless of whether any such anti-anonymous technology gets very far, pursuing it is probably a wasted effort. Plenty of folks have already learned to spoof and hide themselves and pretend to be others. It wouldn't take long for the same thing to happen with any "traceback mechanism" as well. Also, as the article notes, the ITU has no power over the internet these days, but has been pushing to get more power, which is why it's worth following what they're discussing behind the scenes.

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Twitter As An Emergency Broadcast System? Doesn't It Have To Work Regularly First?

from the just-saying... dept

While we definitely found the story of a student in Egypt using Twitter to alert people that he had been arrested interesting, it does seem like a bit of a stretch to then say that it makes sense to create an emergency alert system via Twitter. Though it has some potential to be powerful, an emergency alert system needs to be reliable -- and Twitter is rather infamous for its pretty regular downtime.

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Scott McNealy Has Apparently Never Heard Of AOL Time Warner

from the bad-advice dept

At a conference last week, former Sun CEO Scott McNealy offered some unsolicited advice to telecommunications companies: "look into acquiring Internet destination sites that are heavily trafficked." The idea, apparently, is that Internet applications are where all the money is, and so telecom companies that merely transmit bits for their customers risk getting "marginalized." I don't really understand what he means by that, or why it would be a bad thing. As the market for Internet-based applications gets larger and more competitive, a connection to the Internet is going to become more and more valuable. "Marginalized" or not, telecom companies will be able to make a tidy profit charging for Internet access, especially given that there's still relatively limited competition in the broadband market. The way for broadband firms to increase their profits is to focus on providing faster and more reliable Internet connections, so their customers are willing to pay more for access to all the goodies the Internet has to offer.

Diversifying into application or content markets would divert the telcos' focus away from this core competence. Hybrid network/content companies don't exactly have a great track record. The most spectacular example is probably AOL Time Warner, which, um, didn't work out too well. And the examples McNealy cites don't really work either. He mentions eBay's Skype acquisition, but Skype is an application, not a network provider. Google's participation in the spectrum auction is a better example, but Google has made it pretty clear that its goal isn't to direct customers towards its own sites so much as to ensure that the existing telecom companies don't interfere with customers' access to Google properties. And in any event, Google hasn't even won the auction yet, to say nothing of actually building the network. If it does build its own network, it may turn out to be as big of a disaster as AOL Time Warner was. Telcos should stick to what they know best, and leave website development to companies like Google and Yahoo!

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Competition Decimates Profits In CDN Space

from the deliver-me dept

Last month we noted a new entrant, Korea-based CDNetworks, in the red hot CDN space, where it competes with the likes of Akamai and LimeLight Networks. Since then, shares of Akamai and LimeLight have taken an utter shellacking, as investors wake up to the realization that all of this competition won't be very good for profits. Indeed, it seems that a bitter price war has already broken out, as the core CDN product rapidly becomes a commodity. This trend wasn't particularly hard to see, but the speed at which it's engulfed the industry does come as a bit of a surprise.

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