At the risk of sounding Chicken Little-like, we hypothesize that the Internet is heading toward a “tragedy of the commons”. The tragedy of the commons plays out when a collective system is destroyed due to overuse. An example is the Boston Common that was set aside for communal livestock grazing during early colonial times. It wasn’t long before overuse made it unusable for grazing. In the case of the Internet, consumer access networks are the commons—and they are oversubscribed. It’s a fact of life that as we all use the Internet more, the oversubscription problem will progressively worsen.
Although we can’t predict when overuse of the Internet commons will translate into a deteriorating experience for most broadband users—it will happen. And we believe that the Internet community should act sooner rather than later to define and implement mechanisms to protect user’s interests. Notice we say the “Internet community” should do this. That is because an Internet tragedy of the commons is a communal problem that should be resolved by the community as a whole, not just a single stakeholder (e.g. an ISP).
Some people tell us: “It’s all the ISP’s fault because they oversubscribe their access networks and they should fix it by giving us all more bandwidth.” While others tell us: “It’s the fault of rogue users hogging bandwidth, and ISPs can fix it by controlling their behavior.” We counter both of these viewpoints by repeating what we said a few weeks back—we are all in this together and all stakeholders must cooperate to hammer out solutions
Last week we said that before we can solve Internet performance problems we need facts to identify and characterize each problem. With that in mind we ask—do you know of good solid data about whether or not we are heading toward an Internet tragedy of the commons? If so, please share it with us!
We believe this information is important, and as with global warming, we expect the problem will be difficult to document at first. But if we don’t understand the problem and take action to solve it, we may all be sunk.
