Unleashing the ‘Exaflood’
By BRET SWANSON and GEORGE GILDER
February 22, 2008; Page A15
Two decades ago, Sun Microsystems prophesied:
“The network is the computer.” Today, BitTorrent
video and 3D graphics flood the Internet, Apple
iPhones tap the Net’s computing power, and PC-king
Microsoft pursues Net-centric Yahoo. Sun’s mantra
has become reality.
But as the Internet booms and moves to the center
of the global economic sphere, it draws proportional
attention from politicians and regulators. In Congress
and at the FCC, legislators and lawyers think they
can manage overflowing Net traffic and commerce
better than the network companies themselves. Next
week, the FCC is meeting en banc at Harvard Law
School to consider two petitions that seek to ban
network “traffic management.” The meeting’s host,
Rep. Ed Markey, has renewed his pursuit of a far-
reaching Internet regulatory regime known as “net
neutrality.”
These regulatory efforts overlook a fundamental
shift: An upsurge of technological change and a
rising tide of new forms of data are deeply
transforming the Internet's capabilities and uses.
The first phase of the Net was the original Arpanet
research project that connected a few, and then a few
thousand, scientists. The second phase brought the
Internet to the masses, with the advent of the World
Wide Web, the graphical browser and email in the
mid-1990s. Internet traffic boomed 100-fold between
1994 and 1996. In the third phase of Net evolution,
network architecture and commercial business plans
reflect the dominance of rich video and interactive
media traffic.
The third wave is now swelling into an exaflood,
or torrent, of Internet and Internet Protocol (IP)
traffic. There’s YouTube, IPTV, high-definition
images and “cloud computing”—in which
individuals and businesses use the centralized
computing resources of Google and IBM data
centers, instead of the local computing resources of
their own PCs or office systems. Not to mention the
ubiquitous mobile camera.
To give you an idea of the scope, an exabyte (a
one-quintillion byte unit of information or computer
storage) is 50,000 times larger than a digitized
Library of Congress. By the end of 2006, annual U.S.
Internet traffic was around 10 exabytes.
As new fiber-optic wireline and 3G wireless
networks from AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cox and
Cogent bring us real broadband for the first time, the
nature and volume of Net traffic is changing
dramatically. By mid-2007, Microsoft Video Calling
was generating as many bytes as the entire Internet in
1997.
Cisco’s newest video-conferencing system requires
15 megabits per second in each direction. A one-hour
conference call could thus produce 13.5 gigabytes,
which is more than a high-definition movie. Just 75
of these Cisco conference calls would equal the
entire Internet traffic of the year 1990.
Netflix, which is gradually moving from the post
office to the Net, last year shipped 1.8 million DVDs
every day. If converted to high definition, Netflix
would have mailed 5.8 exabytes of motion pictures,
or almost half the size of the entire U.S. Internet of
2007.
Building on rapid advances in Nvidia and ATI
graphics processors, one 3D multiplayer game (such
as Second Life or World of Warcraft) with one
million users could generate more than an exabyte
per year of network traffic, or almost a tenth of last
year’s U.S. Internet volume.
__________________________________________________
The U.S. Internet will grow
50-fold by 2015.
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In a new Discovery Institute report, we estimate
that, by 2015, U.S. IP traffic will reach an annual
total of 1,000 exabytes, or one million million billion
bytes. The U.S. Internet will thus be 50 times larger
by 2015, equal to 50 million Libraries of Congress.
This will require some $100 billion in new Internet
infrastructure in the U.S. over the next five years.
We need a dramatic expansion in raw capacity, or
bandwidth, and also fine-grained traffic management
capabilities to ensure robust service for increasingly
demanding consumers. But none of this can happen
if we regulate complex network traffic engineering
and experimental business plans.
All networks use some form of traffic management,
whether crude or complex. As our colleague Ken
Ferree notes, every industry, from grocery store
“express lines” to “singles” ski-lift lines, attempts to
shape and manage demand. Today’s communications
networks buffer, label, parse, schedule, prioritize,
route, switch, modify, replicate, police and meter the
bits flowing through their links and nodes. New
pricing schemes that charge per byte consumed
might also help to manage supply and demand on the
Internet.
The petitions under consideration at the FCC and
the Markey net neutrality bill would set an entirely
new course for U.S. broadband policy, marking every
network bit and byte for inspection, regulation and
possible litigation. Every price, partnership,
advertisement and experimental business plan on the
Net would have to look to Washington for
permission. Many would be banned. Wall Street will
not deploy the needed $100 billion in risk capital if
Mr. Markey, digital traffic cop, insists on policing
every intersection of the Internet.
Capacious, big-bandwidth networks will transcend
many of today’s specific complaints. As raw capacity
expands, more and more applications and users can
peacefully coexist. But inevitably, sophisticated
network users with innovative applications will find
creative ways to push the boundaries of capacity on
certain network links, and some bits will be shuffled
and queued.
The network is now a global computer made up of
hardware, software and human minds. But this new,
fast-changing and highly organic computer is no
more easily regulated than were the circuits, storage,
memory and protocols of a mainframe or PC.
Leaving it to Washington agencies and committees to
engineer the exaflood would be an act of
unimaginable folly.
Mr. Swanson is a senior fellow and director of the
Center for Global Innovation at The Progress &
Freedom Foundation. Mr. Gilder is a senior fellow at
the Discovery Institute.