RE: Traffic growth could choke 'Net by 2010

I remember my first course in economics (back in the horse an buggy days of the 60's) where the professor defined the science of economics as optimizing society's use of very limited resources in the face of mankind's unlimited wants. The dilemma we discussed in the first day of class was a clear demonstration of so many aspects of society. It went as follows:

Who would like to own their own sailboat? What would you be willing to pay? Assume you discover how to make sailboats so cheap that anyone can afford one. What should you charge? Assume that you charge so little that everyone bought one and fouled all the lakes in America with sailboats so there was no room to even sail one. You could walk across the lake from boat to boat without ever getting your feet wet. What is that sailboat worth then?

His real life example demonstrated how Henry Ford was so successful with making cheap cars that today we attend college at "commuter campuses" (without dorms), but we are debating how we get the lead out of the gasoline which is beginning to poison our air.

At that same time, we were blessed in the NYC area for having 5 TV stations we could watch. Most of the country had only 2 or 3, if you were even close enough to a city to get TV reception. Then, cable happened and we listen to an MTV singer opine, "500 channels an nuttin to watch".

And so it is true with computers. When I attended that college, I had my computer lab in an actual lab. The computer was a 16K IBM that took up a whole room and needed tempurature and humidity control. The "lab" was where the keypunch machines were. Today, even the poorest grade schools in America have personal computers.

The problem with the internet is it is based on the "free public" model; kind of like it's predecessor, "the free public library". In those early days it was text based and allowed you to go to various universities throughout the nation. and it was also only available at the "free public library", or university.

Before long a company called "Prodigy" allowed me to get the internet in my home for a monthly fee. A year or two later I heard Al Gore talking up the internet like it was a place to do a lot more than just read schorlarly papers. Suddenly these companies started pumping their own content and introduced "browsers" and stuff like that. It was time to put my FTP notes in the trash heap.

Al Gore thought he was promoting the Internet as the information superhighway, but by listening to the commercial lobbyists, he was really promoting all the "billboards" that these hucksters were building on that information superhighway. Today, we have "two billion websites and nuttin to read".

I use the phrase "free public internet" for a reason. When I first studied civil engineering we had a professor who gave us some rules for engineering in the public sector. One was, I have never designed a highway that was exactly "half full" after the first year. Whenever something is promoted as a "free public" anything, it always becomes overloaded because everyone just hears the word "free". Then the pristine park becomes filled with wall to wall people, dodging piles of dog droppings.

Another rule we learned in civil engineering class was "there is no such thing as a free lunch". Namely, the term "free public" does not mean free. It just means that someone else paid for it, or more likely, you paid for it, but in a way that you can't recognize.

So, today, we have bridges and roads falling apart in disrepair because we believed that "free public" really meant free. This is also true with the informaiton superhighway. Build it and they will come. We built it, they came, and there is no room for any more.

The real question is "who will pay for the expansion and the upkeep"? The "free public" has brought us the debackle we have in public schools today. Remember, years ago it was referred to as "free public education". It was the school you went to if you could not afford private school, but it was free.

Today, we have property taxes that are breaking our backs. The state throws in billions more and the Feds dump a trillion a year into education. And, yet, it is still the place you go when you can't afford to go anywhere else. So much for "free".

There are important lessons to learn here. Those basic rules from economics and civil engineering apply in the digital world as much as they do in the brick and mortar world. The questions of who will build it, who will own it and who will maintian it all apply. It's easy to build a little website and hope they will come. But, if you have ever seen a server farm that supports something as big as You Tube, you know that it is far from free.

So, many of the questions that fueled the net neutrality debate apply here. NYC has posted "gridlock days" because there is no more room to build streets. It costs a lot of money to drive your car into that town and a whole lot more to park it for a few hours, and still it is one big traffic jam from 6AM till 9PM.

You are running out of space to build "information roads" and you have no answer as to who will pay for them. You can't just keep on dumping more original content on the net and hope the congestion will just "go away". Because, the last rule we learned in civil engineering is the one that applies to sewage treatment systems and sewers. That rule is "there is no such place as away". It seems like a very apt analogy to what we are doing with the Internet today. Look at 99% of the content and you will see why.

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