The Professor Calls Out Internet Lies Again

Professor Andrew Odlyzko may not be a household name, but he should be to anyone who cares about the internet. Odlyzko is an internet statistician who dives into the past two centuries' worth of statistics, citing the rates of growth of traffic over British steam railroads, the early postal service, laws regarding lighthouses.

In 1998, he said many, including former FCC Commissioner Reed Hundt, were culpable in the telecom bubble. He called out the myth that the internet was doubling every 100 days, noting in section 3 of "Internet traffic growth: Sources and implications" that if the internet were really doubling every 100 days, as was widely reported, it would be growing over 10 times per year, and over 1,000 times every three years.

The telcos had an interest in perpetrating this myth. They were looking for handouts from the government. Other companies such as Inktomi also benefited from the myth. The equipment providers clearly benefited. "The growth rate in Internet traffic is the most important factor in determining demand for equipment," Odlyzko wrote.

These lies should be remembered because they contributed to the boom and the telcom crash that followed it, Odlyzko wrote.

"There are several lessons to be drawn from the myth of astronomical Internet traffic growth. One is that almost all people are innumerate, lacking the ability to handle even simple quantitative reasoning, and in particular to appreciate the power of compound interest. Another one is that people are extremely credulous, especially when the message they hear confirms their personal or business dreams."

This is strong language for a math paper and shows why Odlyzko is frequently quoted by such publications as The Economist.

The telcos don't need DPI

More recently, Odlyzko wrote that the telcos don't need Deep Packet Inspection, an invasion of privacy that the telcos claim they need in order to free up congestion in home internet connections, in a paper called "The Delusions of Net Neutrality".

"What service providers publicly promise to do, if they are given complete control of their networks, is to build special facilities for streaming movies. But there are two fatal defects to that promise. One is that movies are unlikely to offer all that much revenue. The other is that delivering movies in real-time
streaming mode is the wrong solution, expensive and unnecessary," Odlyzko wrote.

The telcos make money from voice, not internet service, and definitely not from movies, and there's not enough money in the movie industry to change that. "For all the hoopla about Hollywood, all the movie theater ticket sales and all the DVD sales in the U.S. for a full year do not come amount to even one month of the revenues of the telecom industry. And those telecom revenues are still over 70% based on voice, definitely a connectivity service," Odlyzko wrote.

So why do the telcos want to have DPI? Video services such as YouTube work fine -- but they don't require streaming technology and the telco derives no income from them.

Odlyzko said there are two reasons why the large internet providers want DPI: "to prevent faster-than-real-time progressive downloads that provide low-cost alternative to [their] expensive service" and "to control low-bandwidth lucrative services that do not need the special video streaming features."

"Communications service providers do have a problem. But it is not that of a flood
of video. Instead, it is that of the erosion of their main revenue and profit source, namely voice. Voice is migrating to wireless. Second lines, and to an increasing extent, even primary landlines, are being abandoned. And voice is (with today’s technologies) a low-bandwidth service, that takes just a tiny fraction of the capacity that modern broadband links provide," Odlyzko concluded.

The propaganda campaign in favor of DPI and against net neutrality is all about who gets to control the internet. The phone and cable companies want to charge for the most basic of services, from e-mail to Google.

When Ed Whitacre, then CEO of AT&T (now CEO of GM) asked for extra cash from Google in a now-famous Businessweek interview, there was widespread revulsion from customers.

"It certainly has the feel of extortion: pay up or no one on our network will be able to reach your website," wrote one commentator.

Some even hoped that Google would become their own internet provider.

Here's the bottom line: net neutrality must not be stopped by lies that are as damaging as those that inflated the telecom bubble.