The FCC and it's lust for the Internet - a cautionary tale
I had posted before about how Julius Genachowski at the Federal Communications Commission
wants to bring the Internet under its wing -- as obviously the present cabal of Anarchists, Libertarians and (shudder) Capitalists have done nothing to protect or promote it.
Mr. Genachowski needs to keep his dick out of places it does not belong and he would do well to study this story from
Computerworld:
Japan's Internet largely intact after earthquake, tsunami
Japan's Internet infrastructure has remained surprisingly unaffected by last week's devastating earthquake and tsunami, according to an analysis by Internet monitoring firm Renesys.
Most Web sites are operational and the Internet remains available to support critical communication functions, Renesys CTO James Cowie wrote in a blog over the weekend.
In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake off the Japanese coast, about 100 of Japan's 6,000 network prefixes -- or segments -- were withdrawn from service. But they started reappearing on global routing tables just a few hours later. Similarly, traffic to and from Japan dropped by about 25 gigabits per second right after the Friday quake, but returned to normal levels a few hours later. And traffic at Japan's JPNAP Layer 2 Internet exchange service appears to have slowed by just 10% since Friday, according to Renesys.
"Why have we not seen more impact on international Internet traffic from this incredibly devastating quake? We don't know yet," Cowie wrote.
What is being demonstrated here is that, at its very heart, the Internet was designed to operate in a hostile environment. Thirty years ago, equipment was a lot less reliable and if a node went down, there was no "voice from above" to tell the data where to go to bypass the dead node. The Internet Protocols were designed to discover other active nodes and to route around the bad node, all the while keeping track of what had been sent and what needed to be sent (you get your email but no duplicate copies, etc...).
Two points for Mr. Genachowski
#1) - the Internet routes around damage, and
#2) - the Internet considers 'management' and censorship as damage.
Posted by DaveH at March 13, 2011 8:19 PM