Hi, Frank - Your post brings up some issues that are central to the question of usage of the 'net.
In general, I think of a few terms when I look at the questions raised: perceptions, growth, enablement, traffic control, economics.
'My main point is that just like borrowing begets borrowing (borrowing from one of AHhaha's latest arguments today), information begets information, no matter how it is delivered, and it takes power to house, process, manage and store information in an amazingly upward-spiraling way.'
At the risk of restating the obvious, the internet is not 'free'. It has a 'cost', in terms of energy usage, administration, maintenance, and infrastructure growth. There is a real question as to whether 'net usage prices are presently reflecting these realities.
People have been told that we are building an "Information Superhighway", and they have rushed to use it. But what are the rules on that highway? To make a very poor comparison, some people are doing 300 mph, others are hogging two lanes, others are doing stunts. And the toll for whatever you want to do? Minimal, negligible: more to the point, it's the same for everyone.
Until those realities are properly reflected, there is no limit to potential growth, theoretically. In fact however, we know that things cannot continue the way they are going. The price to transmit and receive information should reflect the costs. There is good reason to believe it does not.
"Cost", and by extension, "price" are effective traffic cops.
Taking a quick side-trip into some of the questions raised between you and Ahahaha, there is no question that the simple transmission of information will grow with world population, and the emergence of new, technologically sophisticated economies.
One could argue that at some point in the (progression?) of humanity, that there will simply be no room for people on this planet. There will be room, only for the information we have amassed over centuries: that, and Ahahaha's 'caretakers' of this information. You could write a good science-fiction book on the subject.
That Malthusian outlook could be equally applied to garbage, or any other product of human existence. The answer lies in reaching the point of equilibrium. But prior to reaching that point, the answer lies in traffic control, in content control. Technologically, the answer lies in new storage and retrieval technologies, but it is a losing game. In the end, there will be an end.
That is, until humanity reaches some sort of Arthur C. Clarke denouement, and that's no closer than '2001' proved to be.
The ability to bypass snail mail began with leased lines, and interconnected networks. It reached the 'popular' level with the fax: though that did not remove long distance charges. One could argue that the appearance of the fax not only created an ability, it created an appetite, at every level (I wonder if there has been an analysis of telecomms traffic since the arrival of the fax?). My point here is that this technology was the first step in enabling the cheap instantaneous transfer of information, and people loved it. Now whole documents could be transmitted, virtually instantaneously.
And so could the latest joke, a letter, a news clipping. Simultaneously, we began to decrease the difficulty and the cost of information transmission, and increased the likelihood that such transmission would be 'trivial' in some sense.
Then came the 'net. Usage was constrained by the limitations of software, and the 'net itself, originally. Without going into a history of these things, we are now at a point where the ability that manifested itself with the fax, and that people and businesses liked so much, has now been multiplied ferociously.
The simple email has often turned into 10 Mb, with a mulimedia file nested in 2 lines of text.
People and businesses have been promised an information superhighway, and they're out there, using it every day. The world is full of people emailing each other the latest Dilbert cartoon, of porn sites emailing the daily picture, and yes, the Powerpoint demo.
If you're a business, why should you enable intranet transmission, when everyone in the company knows that with just a few clicks, they can send anything they want, over the 'net? Why bother with anything else? If a company elects to make an arrangement that places its traffic on its own network, to what extent will that enable communication with others external to that network? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the main driver of company intranet usage, as opposed to internet usage, seems to be QoS: not utility, and certainly not universality.
And, it's fair to say that right now, the architects of the 'net are bending their backs to the task of enabling the net to do the very things that you state, quite accurately, increase the load on the very resource they're trying to create.
You and Ahahaha make excellent points about the growth in information traffic, and the constantly growing administrative and infrastructure costs of same, not to mention the energy costs. At present, we exist in a state where 'vitual' transportation (to the extent that it is possible or appropriate) has not yet replaced physical transportation.
My response to that would be:
(1) That such growth, and cost is inevitable: the results are predictable. The results can be moderated, but not eliminated.
(2) That we will begin, in the next 20 to 50 years, to feel the massive effects on humanity as we attempt to wean ourselves from hydrocarbon fuels. We are starting to identify and address some of these issues now.
(3) That the 'net's costs are tied to the cost of energy: to the extent that the relative cost of electronic transmission and storage of information defeats physical transmission and storage of information, we will migrate to the former.
(4) IMO, what we are really saying is that the 'net is not 'free': it has costs, physical and human. Agreed. In the end, it's a question of relative cost. When oil is $1000 a barrel, I still believe that there will be more people using the 'net, not less. When oil is unobtainable - well, it takes a long extension cord to run a ship, or an airplane.
We are at the dawn of a historically important time: the confluence of IT, the rapid decline in fossil fuel resourves, the effects of global warming, and the time when one or two more doubles of human population will have hellacious consequences.
In that time, the 'net will become a necessary, indispensable resource: a true infrastructure cost. It will flourish, even as we see the grass start to grow in the cracks in our highways.
If it is to work efficiently, prices should properly reflect the cost of usage.
It is not, and never will be, 'free'.
Best regards.
Jim |
