The concurrence of two seemingly unrelated events has finally shaken me out of my several year “planning phase” and prompted me to actually write a blog post. Event, the first: Last Wednesday the internet went out for a couple tens of millions of people on the other side of the world. The situation has only gotten worse. Something happened to some pretty important cables in the Mediterranean and left people from Dubai to Bangladesh vying for little remaining bandwidth or scrambling to reroute access through satellite systems. Initial reports blamed a boat trying to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather for severing two oceanic cable systems on January 30th. That explanation looked good for the cut that happened off the coast of Egypt near Alexandria, but not for the cut that happened within a few hours, but hundreds of miles away near Marseille, France. No one seems to have even bothered to try to explain the third major data artery to go dead. It did so two days later, due to some sort of damage off the coast of Dubai in the Persian Gulf.
Now, two days after that, another one. Qatar is now offline as a result of damage to a conduit from that country to the UAE. Also late-breaking: Egypt checked, there was no boat near the original incident site.
So, four major linkages in the global data network have gone down in and around the Middle East over the last five days for seemingly unrelated reasons, none of which have been explained.
Event, the second: Yacrosoft!
It doesn’t bear repeating. Microsoft made a bid for Yahoo!. The internet went, predictably, nuts. Every news outlet reported it and every blog speculated about what might result from it.
Google responded to the news with a strongly worded condemnation of the potential acquisition and the Times is reporting that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt phoned Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang “offering the company’s help in fending off Microsoft, possibly in the form of a partnership between the companies.”
Google’s interest in the situation is obvious—the deal would merge the distant second and third place players in the search arena into one potentially realistic challenger for the thrown Google practically invented for itself. However, the response from the Googleplex cannot be reduced to, or dismissed as, merely corporate self-interest. They’ve got some good points:
The openness of the Internet is what made Google—and Yahoo!—possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.
So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies—and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
The sentiment behind this statement is powerful and emphatically true. Especially the part about the internet being such an exciting place and especially the part about how that excitement is made possible by the ready and effective dissemination of information.
That system is down at the moment. This corporate affair that is clogging the first world’s bandwidth with an unbelievable amount of chatter regards an internet that has four deep, mysterious cuts in it right now.
I have an RSS ticker add-on installed so that there is a constant stream of new information scrolling across the top of my Firefox window. I have it connected to my del.icio.us subscriptions and network. I subscribe to tags like “web” and “internet” among several others ranging across disparate subject areas. Never has a single news item so clogged my personal data stream. There’s just an endless flood of articles about the Yacrosoft! bid. Many of my favorite blogs have multiple, lengthy posts about its various implications for the future of the web. The fact that the web is inexplicably disintegrating in the Orient is literally getting drowned out by all the excitement over this Silicon Valley love triangle.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work. When a big part of the world gets cut off from the network, everyone is supposed to feel it—because everyone is cut off.If they can’t communicate with us, we can’t communicate with them. Although Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and a handful of others might make it seem otherwise, there is no center of the internet from which to be cut off. At least, there’s not supposed to be.
The news stories I have seen about this major loss of connectivity note that it’s a demonstration of how fragile the internet is. They’re right, but for the completely wrong reason. Of course it breaks if the wires get cut. It’s not magic. (We still all understand that, don’t we? That it’s made out of stuff? Right?) That’s not shocking nor should it be worrying.
What is worrying but unfortunately not shocking is that when millions and millions of people “over there” get “disconnected,” the developed world, at least the United States, is not all that affected. They are cut off from us—not we from them.
Are there millions of people who don’t even know about Google’s response to Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo! because the wires connecting their countries to the ones where major international news outlets have their servers are, for some reason, broken? It’s unclear at this time. Reporting on the consequences of the disconnection is a little sketchy, possibly as a result of it.
If this can happen and be of so little consequence then the world is a very long way away from the type of global super interconnectivity that the companies currently making the headlines are supposed to be facilitating. The decentralized, non-hierarchical, evolving, dynamic internet in which I like to believe, and to which Google is appealing against the evil of Microsoft, seems at the moment much more fancy than fact. Patching the physically damaged network won’t change its underlying asymmetry.
But, for now, let’s just hope that it stops coming apart at the seams.
