Apr 19, 2008 12:30 PM
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South Park already showed us how to fix the internet, but what really struck me was Randy's speech at the end—he totally sounded like an AT&T or Comcast executive when he said, "It's easy for us to think we can just use up all the internet we want but...it could one day be gone forever." Actually, that's exactly what AT&T's VP for Legislative Affairs Jim Cicconi said at the Westerminister eForum: "We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the internet by 2010." Update: AT&T's saying now that Cicconi was mis-quoted, and the doomy prediction was from a study. What he actually said was, "In three years' time 20 typical households here in London will generate more traffic than the entire Internet did back in 1995."
And it's because you assholes are using it too much. Cicconi argued that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" currently flooding the tubes will increase to 50 times what it is now by 2015, with video making up 80 percent of all internet traffic by 2010. So yeah, you really can only use the internet for porn twice a day, max, or it could one day be gone forever.
Of course, this was all just a lead up to poo on government-enforced net neutrality, the overt argument being that only the ISPs know how to manage the internet, with the subtext that only traffic management can save it: "I don't think government intervention is the right way to do this kind of thing. I don't think government can anticipate these kinds of technical problems. Right now, I think Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem."
But can you really trust someone who doesn't believe in the giant Linksys router? [Cnet via Valleywag]
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