A contribution from Marco Fioretti, reacting to an earlier post:
“I would like to share some thoughts and doubts I’ve had for years about the “fast, universal Net access for everybody” dogma.
I deliberately focus on what is actually doable, good and necessary
today (0 to ~30 years), not on how life could be or will be for our
grand-grandchildren.
There are a few concepts to re-analyze together here:
1) production, replication and distribution of digital goods costs nothing, or practically nothing
2) centralized infrastructures (think YouTube, Flickr, etc…) are much more expensive than distributed infrastructures (file sharing networks from Napster to TPB and beyond)
3) regardless of its architecture, the costs of the infrastructure should/could be distributed (socialized)
4) fast, cheap, unmetered internet access is good, necessary and a human right, like education, etc…
Concept #1 is, very often, a myth. Producing and keeping up and running all the material infrastructure needed to copy and distribute willy-nilly “immaterial” goods has a huge cost. Huge. Read for reference:
* http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/one-loaf-per-child/2007/06/14
*http://p2pfoundation.net/Thoughts_on_P2P_production_and_deployment_of_physical_objects
* http://www.infoworld.com/d/green-it/report-us-companies-waste-28b-year-powering-unused-pcs-758 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/data-centers-are-becoming-big-polluters-study-finds/?ref=technology
* http://www.socialroi.com/interesting-facts-about-digital-waste.html http://sitemaker.umich.edu/section002group3/e-waste
* http://www.afro.who.int/heag2008/docs_en/New%20and%20emerging%20threats.pdf
* http://www.ban.org/photogallery/
With respect to concept #2, bandwidth is bandwidth and storage is storage. I am not sure that changing from concentrated to distributed would reduce so much the order of magnitude of the cost mentioned in the links above. More on this in a moment.
I am not sure that performance and reliability would always be at least equal in the distributed case. Downloading a video from a professional server farm like YouTube’s takes more or less the same time now and one month from now. Whereas downloading via torrents is faster only if you want what everybody else is downloading, or at least seeding, in the same moment. This is a minor point however.
A more important issue is if the real cost of one billion desktops and fast bidirectional connections, all “forced” to be servers/sources because there is no centralized structure built in a much more professional, highly efficient way, using much less raw materials and energy. Are there any data about this?
Back to the cost of distributed vs “centralized content distribution” networks. I recently found some numbers about a very efficient, highly decentralized content distribution networks, ie spam. Spam today is mostly generated and redistributed by infected desktops but still dissipates 33TWh/year:
* http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=7316
* http:??www.softlist.net/press/pandalabs_says_half_a_million_computers_are_infected_with_malicious_bots_every_day-62.html
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/08/spam-malware-online-security
So, the first two points could be summarized as “no matter how you do it, production, replication and distribution of digital goods of the scale advocated by proponents of universal access, worldwide free flowing culture and communication, etc…has a very big, very material cost. Better wake up and accept it”
At this point, we can move to “who should pay for it”. It’s an important decision, because the cost **is** huge but the benefits to society of fast, universal connectivity should be even bigger.
Personally, I am sure that there are a lot of important things that, from a human/civil right standpoint, everybody should have the possibility (someetimes the duty!) to do online: communicate, study, check what the government is doing to keep it under control, publish opinions, work, etc… I’m convinced that the more people actually use the Internet in this way, the better, so I could agree with a law that says “doing these things is a basic right, so everybody must be connected and the related costs must be entirely socialized”
The point is, to do all those things you don’t need broadband. Not the kind the ISPs want to sell these days, to transform the Internet in the next TV.
I think that to make your own life and the world better, a stable, flat-rate connection at 512KBps or so is enough these days, so I could support socializing the costs of connecting everybody in that way. I would be happy if flat rate Internet offers where I live didn’t start at ~20 Euro/month for 5 MBps but from something like 5 Euro/month for 512KBps. Why don’t they?
But is it really necessary and fair to subsidize the cost of both the access and (above all) the backbone infrastructure that would be needed to keep everybody hooked at 5, 10, 20 MB?? I’m not saying it would be bad, but if it costs too much (especially in these times) and it isn’t really necessary…
There are tons of “content” online that could take much less space and bandwidth. I find all the time podcasts or video tutorials which are in that form ONLY because the author wouldn’t take the time to transcript what he said. So we’re all left with something that takes much more to download, isn’t indexable as efficiently as text, is much slower to navigate back and forth, much harder to mix and mash with other content…
Here are a few cases where real fast broadband isn’t, IMO, something whose costs should be socialized (remember that you can’t really separate the costs of access from those of backbone)
– if you’re stuck with cloud computing or software as a service,
including any webmail or online office suite, that is if you gave up
control of who owns and sees all your data. If so, you have a
separate problem which would remain even if bandwidth were really
gratis
– online games
– digital bulimia, that is downloading everything you find, even if
you’ll never need it, “just because it’s there”
Please note that, even if you’re a “producer”, ie a private citizen who blogs on whatever argument, a small business or an artist who puts online his/her works, it can MAKE much more technical/ecological/ economical sense to rent for that a virtual server in a professional datacenter in a country which gives a minimum of warranties about civil rights… than to run a website from the second-hand PC in your closet which could break every second and consumes much more power than a virtual one (Virtual servers are NOT cloud computing!).
The solution? Maybe it is to subsidize “basic flat connectivity” as described above, and let everything else to be paid directly by those who have or feel the need for it.
More exactly: instead of an infrastructure based on the dogma that everybody needs and wants 10+ MBps to everything else worldwide, dimension network and fees so that the basic connectivity costs much less than today, but the “heavy users” pay by themselves the burden they place on the network (ie on everybody else and the environment), since very often what they’re doing is NOT bad, but isn’t really necessary to society as a whole.
This is NOT an attack to net neutrality, of course. In this context, a good read is “Net neutrality: An American problem?” (I agree with those Australian ISPs!).
This approach is just recognizing that advertising like “for just one low fee you’re entitled to unlimited traffic” (which, by the way, is exactly what keeps running today’s decentralized file sharing networks!!!) never was nothing more than an unsustainable marketing scam.
This isn’t even anything new, by the way. It has been a well known fact of life among webmasters for YEARS that “if an hosting provider gives you unlimited bandwidth, he’s either incompetent or not 100% honest. There can’t be anything like “unlimited bandwidth”. All hosting providers cut traffic, because their network would melt or cost too much otherwise. It’s just that the good ones tell it to you fair and square in advance, in the contract, how and when they will do it”. Search in any webmaster forum and you’ll find posts repeating these concepts since the nineties, and they never changed.
So the only news here may be the wish that literally everybody (not just “professionals”) can become a producer, or at least a (re)distributor, without analyzing if the goal is (at least in the medium/short term) intrinsically sustainable, or generally worth of being completely socialized.”