One of the most daunting technological challenges we face today is scaling up this old internet of ours to meet the burgeoning consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive real-time applications such as telecommuting, cloud computing, and streaming media.

And as internet video continues to trend from short-form/long-tail/low quality content towards long-form/short-tail/high quality (premium) content (i.e. from YouTube to hulu to TV/films on embedded hardware), exploding consumer demand could bring things to a head even more quickly than currently anticipated.
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Historically, administration of the internet (that same internet that now supports billions of dollars of e-commerce) has been a remarkably communal, non-commercial endeavor, depending on a loose collection of several multinational government research agencies and non-profit corporations.  That such a non-centralized and flat coalition of groups and interested individuals could successfully manage the astronomical scaling up of the internet we’ve witnessed over the last few decades is truly amazing, yet largely taken for granted.

These days, though, one of the primary long-term trends we’re seeing is the emergence of the Content Delivery Network – in essence, a privatized internet.  The growth of these additional proprietary layers is primarily driven by technological considerations – both internet video and cloud computing are placing demands on the internet Vint Cerf could not have imagined.

However, the end result could well be the marginalization of today’s egalitarian public internet (we’ve already touched on the growing presence of proprietary content delivery networks and Google’s pursuit of transcontinental fiber here, and on the resulting implications for Net Neutrality here).

CDNs and proprietary backbone links both represent workarounds of the public internet routing structure, but there’s another part of the internet undergoing similar changes: the Domain Naming System (DNS).   While routing is all about numeric IP addresses, DNS is about mapping these unfriendly numeric addresses (such as “216.239.113.101” or “2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334” in the case of IPv6) to more human-appropriate names such as “digitalmissive.com”.  In other words, DNS is essentially a massively distributed database – yet one the fulfills an absolutely crucial function, if you think about it.

However, as impressive as DNS is, it’s also a key point of vulnerability – if you want to see what a jungle it is out there on the internet, just try maintaining your own publicly exposed  DNS server and watch the attacks launched against it (trust me on that one).  Furthermore, it’s not a very transparent system, and any changes made to a DNS record can take over a day to fully propagate across the entire system.  It only follows then, that as with routing, proprietary DNS systems would emerge, representing the next step in the ongoing privatization of the internet.  And so we have Dynamic DNS and firms such Dynect.  Dynect offers enterprises using distributed cloud computing applications a highly optimized private dynamic DNS system – including additional features such as load balancing, traffic management, and failover.  As with CDNs, all this functionality is localized to the end user via Dynect’s geographically diverse network of data centers, to help minimize exposure to the increasingly strained and messy public internet cloud.

Clearly, there are sound technological reasons for the emergence of these additional privatized layers of the internet.  As for what it means in terms of the nature of the internet itself going forward, I’m less sure.

Any thoughts?

Net Neutrality.  Up to now, the conventional definition of the concept has been that internet service providers shall be prohibited from “blocking or slowing content from some applications or companies” (as quoted from a recent NetworkWorld article).  Arguably, the definitive infraction against this particular notion of Net Neutrality was Comcast’s recent ‘managing’ of Bit Torrent traffic via the insertion of spurious connection reset packets.

However, the whole issue the issue of Net Neutrality (at the last mile between the ISP and the consumer, at least) is rapidly becoming a moot point: in preparation for the expected explosion of demand for longer-form video over IP, most major carriers are now scrambling to assemble and/or acquire proprietary content delivery networks (CDN)s to avoid the ever more congested and unpredictable system of routers out there in the public cloud (a recent post about just what Google, Microsoft, and Verizon are up to can be found here).

So while your neighborhood ISP might maintain a commitment to Net Neutrality itself, the real action is well upstream, as major corporations join already established CDN players such as Akamai, Edge Networks, and Yahoo’s Cloudfront to distribute and/or cache digital media content out along the edge of the cloud, in effect forming competing private mini-clouds to minimize the role of the public internet itself.

Put another way, in the purest sense of the term, Net Neutrality has already become something of an anachronism – not due to any localized slowing down of unfavored packets at the ISP level, but due to a globalized speeding up of favored packets on CDNs, before they ever reach the ISP.   A recent Wall Street Journal article touches on just this nuanced distinction: according to Google, their recent proprietary internet/CDN initiatives “do not rely on the carrier’s unilateral control over the last-mile connections to consumers, and also do not involve discriminatory intent“ – and even the independent public interest organization Public Knowledge (whose directors include internet academic and Obama advisor Lawrence Lessig) now maintains that “caching in no way is a part of the Net Neutrality issue.”

I’m of the opinion there’s considerably more gray area here.  But no matter – since the public internet will simply not scale to meet the anticipated bandwidth demand once short-tail (mainstream) premium digital media over IP becomes widespread, both carriers and content owners will increasingly invest in proprietary content delivery networks – and as consumers buy into the mass-market internet video offerings made possible by these high-performance CDNs, the very concept of Net Neutrality will seem increasingly quaint – and the “internet” as a whole will come to resemble the American health care system: multi-tiered and largely privatized.

So to the extent long-form video over IP ultimately enjoys widespread mass-market success,  the innocent ideal of a truly egalitarian and fundamentally neutral internet is destined to end, no matter what your local ISP’s policies are.

Don’t shoot the messenger…  

Who knew? Porn on the New York subway. But then again, wasn’t it inevitable?

The place: A crowded afternoon N train from Manhattan to Brooklyn. The culprit: a Sony PlayStation Portable held by a young man sitting and watching in solitude, yet surrounded by plenty other strap hangers trying to get home.

What exactly happened here?

The first thing that got me was the audacity of it. With his PSP packed with genuine XXX fodder, simply put, what he was watching was nothing short of hard core pornographic visual certainly not intended for public transportation.

The next thing I noticed, no one seemed to pay attention. Hence – at least for the duration of my ride – no one seemed to mind.

What about the woman next to him, seemingly asleep? Another nearby busied herself reading, of all things, scripture. There were plenty  of other men and woman immediately around us while others got on and off the train.

Now, I know New York subway commuters have long learned to mind their own business.

But the video that unfolded in front of all of us (the sound was muted) clearly lowered the bar on anyone’s standard of privacy; clearly was so out of the ordinary that for it mere ostentatiousness I figured someone would have to bring it up.

Above and beyond my own discontent about the young man’s obvious lack of social skills, I quickly found myself rather intrigued by something else in this – the apparent disconnect between device and audience.

What used to be a consumer video experience “curbed” by the lack of technology’s reach, a TV set and a VCR simply didn’t lend itself to any practical use in full public view.

This kept anyone’s viewing choice a private matter. No matter how sexual, violent, or mundane the footage was, consumption and intent remained locked inside the home.

Fast forward, today’s “anytime anywhere” video consumption capabilities have changed the playing field. The new paradigm: Anyone’s personal video experience is super-portable, devoid of any particular time, place, and for that matter choice of companion viewers.

Think about it.

Sprint Nextel recently started delivering WiMAX-enabled wireless broadband service powerful enough to give you downlink speeds of 25 Mbps or more while driving down the highway.

Essentially an open pipe into and out of the World Wide Web, it’s going to be interesting to see what passing cars are watching in the back seats once content is no longer limited to wholesome satellite subscription services or Disney DVDs brought along for the kids.

And what about in-flight Web access, such as the service recently announced by American Airlines for select domestic trips?

No matter whether on a highway, on an airplane or inside a subway car in New York, what’s OK for the person to the left of you might be unacceptable to the one on the right.

Clearly, with the pervasive nature of digital content and enabling delivery devices, the meaning of “privacy” is undergoing change.

As to my personal opinion, I am in favor of self-regulating one’s public conduct. Anything beyond that might quickly collide with core principles such as net neutrality or freedom of speech.

Still, our old-world definition of privacy seems to be changing as more of our new world trends towards digital and portable at once.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.

Just read David Pogue’s recent article on the Vudu set-top IPTV box with interest, as I’ve been doing some research writing on just this subject recently.

A good first-hand user-level review of the device – however, he neglects to mention the really unique thing about Vudu, which is the peer to peer data transfer model.  Why is this so important?  Because residential internet connections are heavily optimized for downstream performance at the expense of upstream – and when I say heavily, I mean heavily (downstream speeds can easily be five to six times faster than upstream). The thinking (correct, as it happens, until recently) is that most users are browsing web pages and streaming youtube from centralized servers (downstream traffic) rather than hosting any meaningful amount of data (upstream traffic). Not so with peer to peer technology, wherein each client is also a data host (or mini-server, if you will) visible to all the other clients using the system at the time.

So to the extent Vudu becomes popular, it’s going to impact the residential ISP’s soft white underbelly, their Achilles heel – upstream bandwidth.  As an indication of just how concerned residential ISPs are about this kind of thing, one need only look at Comcast, who was caught inspecting packets and secretly resetting clients’ BitTorrent connections to slow down the upstream traffic (and is currently appealing the resulting FCC fine).

So if Vudu hits big, we ain’t seen nothing yet – the potential success of the device portends quite the Net Neutrality showdown.