“Maybe the Internet has already collapsed,” Metcalfe says to me later that day, in a lecture that lasts the dinner hour. “Everyone complains about brownouts every day. But it’s going to get worse. Worse! Worse! Worse!” The inventor of the Ethernet networking system and founder of the 3Com corporation has risked his considerable reputation by publicly predicting a “gigalapse”–in which a billion hours of access time are lost–by the end of the year. This would far eclipse the recent dead spells at America Online and Netcom, one of the biggest Internet service providers. More important, the collapse could also cast doubts on the reliability of cyberspace itself. Since the consensus is that just about everything from movies to mail is eventually going to move to the Internet, this is serious stuff.
The problem, as Metcalfe sees it, is that the Net is incapable of handling the millions of immigrants washing up on its virtual shores. There is neither the physical capacity to shuttle all of those bits of information its users generate nor the organizational capacity to address the problem. Some people rhapsodize about the fact that the Internet has no president, no police and no blueprints for organized growth; new standards are arrived at by consensus, and it’s up to companies like Sprint and MCI to beef up the “backbone” that handles the bulk of the information flow. To Metcalfe this is more travesty than rhapsody. He rails against the destructive “ideology” that celebrates the decentralized, semi-anarchic structure of the Internet. In Metcalfe’s thinking, it’s time for engineers in sandals to step aside and let professionals in suits run the show. “My mission is to accelerate the fixing of the Internet,” he says, and by spinning doom, he’s grabbed our attention.
But is the Internet really broken? In some ways, this is an issue that can be argued only by ultrawireheads familiar with stuff like routing tables and digital switching. And these folks disagree. John Curran, the chief technical officer of the Internet-centric company BBN Corp., says that while an Internet collapse is possible, “it’s not likely to happen–about the chances of a meteor striking.” John Quarterman, head of MIDS, a company that attempts to measure traffic on the Net, says that there are no data to support Metcalfe’s claims. “I’ve been hearing about an Internet collapse since 1977,” he says.
Even those who do concede that a breakdown may occur don’t necessarily think that a restructuring is necessary. “The Internet has collapsed many times and probably will collapse several more times,” says Robert Berger, head of InterNex, a sophisticated Internet service provider. “But at the same time a new Internet is rising from the ashes. Pieces of a new, more robust network are being built.” In other words, yeah, things may be a bit screwed up now, but the cavalry is on its way, as companies invest billions of dollars into new technologies that will move more information more efficiently. (MCI, for instance, increased its part of the backbone almost fifteenfold this year.) Maybe these entities won’t move fast enough to satisfy the insatiable demand that comes from millions of new users playing with data-gobbling toys like videoconferencing, telephony and cross-continental shoot’em-ups. But it may well be sufficient to keep this remarkable engine of change moving along, albeit with the occasional brownout.
When you get down to it, even if Bob Metcalfe’s rough beast of a gigalapse does arrive, it really doesn’t portend doom for the Internet. Nor should we panic at the chronic annoyances caused by slow response times or reluctantly loading Web pages. (After all, that delay I suffered in getting Metcalfe’s clips only seemed eternal–it actually took less than two minutes.) For all its slowdowns, the Internet has been handling unprecedented, mind-boggling growth; for more than a decade it has doubled its size every year. It’s worked its way into our culture and our heads faster than the telephone, the car or the boob tube. Bob Metcalfe may believe that a more structured approach is appropriate from here on in, but decentralization, anarchy or whatever you want to call it has done a remarkable job thus far, not only in a technological sense but in a cultural one. And all of this has come from a little experiment designed to link together a few computer centers! In light of that truly amazing legacy, so what if cyberspace undergoes a temporary breakdown, sort of an Information Infastructure equivalent of a quickie retreat to the Betty Ford clinic? After that collapse, if it does occur, we can pick ourselves up, coolly assess what further improvements might be needed and continue the process of a communications revolution.
