Net Stupidity

Avid followers of online idiocy, who have spent the last few years of their lives migrating from hotornot.com to Homestar Runner to the Numa Numa dance and beyond, might be unfazed if they heard the Internet characterized as a “dumb” network. The rest of us, though, we discriminating readers of the online edition of The Crimson, we Wikipedians and fans of Google Scholar, might take a bit of offense at such nomenclature.

It should come as something of a surprise, then, that creating a dumb network was among the loftiest goals of the founding fathers of the Internet. What they meant by “dumb” is that the network itself—the routers, switches, and cables that cross the world—should be agnostic to the sort of data it is carrying. All information, whether a piece of an Internet telephone call, a Viagra ad, or the membership of “Students For California Relocation of Harvard University,” gets the same right of passage.

The name for this paradigm is “end-to-end”—the idea, in some sense, that the intelligence of a network ought to be pushed out to the edges, to the computer on your desk, your cell phone, or your new Internet-enabled toaster. Not all networks are built this way. The original analog telephone system had complex call-routing hardware in the middle, while the phones themselves were little more than converters between audio and voltage signals. The Internet, though, wasn’t designed to carry just phone calls or just instant messages—it’s a general purpose vehicle.

With that goal in mind, end-to-end is a policy which reflects an incredible amount of forethought: encapsulated within it is the notion that, on the Internet, it’s very difficult to tell what technologies are going to prove important in the long run. If priority had been given early on to Gopher or WAIS (two information search technologies which have gone the way of the Dodo and the 8-track), the web might never have had enough bandwidth to gain traction.

Some people occasionally find end-to-end frustrating, and sometimes quite reasonably so. Certain traffic, it seems, really is more important. In the late ’90s, when Napster entered the scene, it was so efficient at music swapping that academic uses of limited university bandwidth were hindered, so many schools (Harvard included) set out policies which gave preference to web and e-mail traffic over peer-to-peer file sharing.

Another reason for sidestepping end-to-end, however, has certain technophiles up in arms: money. Some Internet providers, such as Comcast, offer new Internet telephony services. But a traditional phone conversation effectively gets its own dedicated pair of wires. So if Comcast’s telephone service is going to compete, it’s going to need to give its users equally good guarantees on their network, ahead of ordinary Internet traffic.

Other breaches of end-to-end are in the works as well. Some Internet providers, struggling in competitive and costly markets, have expressed discontent with Google’s soaring profits. After all, a big component of Google’s success is that Verizon and Comcast are willing to deliver all of Google’s ads to their millions of subscribers. Verizon, among others, has proposed charging tariffs on sites like Google and Amazon since these sites use a lot of Verizon’s bandwidth for their own profit.

And early in February, Yahoo and AOL announced—ostensibly to protect their users from spam—that they would start offering an inexpensive (half a cent or so per message) exemption from spam filtering. The idea is that individual senders like you or me would happily pay the dollar per week that sending mail would cost us, while the purveyors of Cialis would have to think twice before spending the hundreds of thousands their present activities would cost. But both companies readily agree they’d be forced to deliver even the mail of those that don’t pay, albeit through notoriously unreliable spam filters, and so it’s hard to imagine doing much better with this than the status quo.

The trouble with these charges is that they raise the cost to innovation. A legitimate fledgling business with the need to send lots of e-mail might have difficulty fielding the costs AOL will begin to impose. And what might have become of the Facebook if, when it was just a small Harvard-only affair, it had been asked to pay dues to various Internet service providers in order for us to be able to check our profiles while at home over spring break?

There are other, more frightening worries as well. Adding the technology to prevent the delivery of certain kinds of e-mails or stop web traffic opens the door for censorship or anticompetitive practices: Is Verizon required to allow its subscribers to visit cingular.com?

The stupidity of the Internet has, over the past 20 years, been among the most important properties contributing towards its exponential growth. Those who hold the reins, the Internet service providers, are acting as corporations do and trying to turn a profit. But we the users, Facebook addicts, and literature researchers alike, need to watch carefully to make sure this essential principle doesn’t fall by the wayside. For if the network gets too smart for its own good, who knows what great procrastination tools of the future will never make it to our desks?



Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.