Wrong on the "Exaflood," Wrong on Network Neutrality

In 2007, Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, published a paper that hyped a so-called "Exaflood" -- a kooky Discovery Institute idea about how the Internet would drown in its own data.

The Nemertes press release on the paper was widely reported in newspapers. It described itself as a ". . . landmark study . . . groundbreaking analysis . . . evidence the exaflood is coming . . . "

It said,

The findings indicate that by 2010 . . . users could increasingly encounter Internet "brownouts" or interruptions to the applications they’ve become accustomed to using on the internet.

We are mere weeks from 2010. There's no sign of The Exaflood or brownouts. In fact, the best data indicate that Internet growth appears to be slowing. In two short years, the Nemertes paper's main conclusion is falsified by the data.

Now Johna Till Johnson says, Hello Net Neutrality, Goodbye Internet. She says that Net Neutrality gives carriers

. . . just one option for recouping their costs: Charge by the bit.

Wow. Talk about false choices!

Maybe she's forgotten about "charge by the month," and "charge more for faster connections." How about "charge more for better service."

Maybe the poor carriers aren't making enough to build faster Internet connections. Verizon just made a paltry $6 billion in profits last year and paid $1.3 billion in dividends. AT&T made $12 billion and paid out $2.5 billion to shareholders. These companies need help, Johna. They're really suffering from too much government regulation to build a good Internet.

Johna Till Johnson's "Goodbye Internet" screed misses today's real Net Neutrality action, which is in wireless. The wireless NN action is not about big bandwidth at all. Quite the opposite. Spurred by FCC Chairman Genichowski's recent speech suggesting that wireless NN should be the law of the land, the discussion has shifted to whether wireless companies have the right to block competing low bandwidth apps like texting and telephony over IP. As Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett recently said in the Washington Post,

For wireless, the arbitrage risk comes from low bandwidth applications like Skype and Google Voice, but unfortunately for the voice business, almost all the revenue today comes from low bandwidth voice and data applications. So it's a risk that simply can't be managed by the adoption of usage-based pricing schemes.

So up to now, operators have managed that risk by simply prohibiting certain applications. In net neutral world, they wouldn't have that luxury.

Network Neutrality has never been about the idea of too much bandwidth on a limited network. That's dinosaur feces. It's always been about whether the telcos and cablecos could leverage ties between their network and certain apps to make discriminatory, anti-competitive profits.

The strength of the Internet is that it accepts all traffic without a "will it make money" test. That's why a Pez dispenser collector could grow a hobbyist site into eBay. It's how two Stanford students could grow their thesis into Google. It's how an Israeli apps company that wanted to reduce its phone bill invented Internet telephony. Johna Till Johnson isn't just wrong this time, she has it exactly backwards; the reality is that if we ever say "Goodbye Net Neutrality" we'll also be saying, "Goodbye Internet."

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