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 Forbes ASAP, August 26, 1996 Feasting on the Giant Peach Will the Internet Collapse? No Way! What is all this commotion in Massachusetts? The very source of the ARPAnet at Bolt, Beranek & Newman—the cradle of the Internet—Massachusetts is falling to the forces of Auntie Spiker and Aunt Sponge. These are the mingy ladies in the Roald Dahl story who rejoiced in James’s Giant Peach as long as it didn’t take flight. Now Massachusetts—the state that once barred Apple shares as a likely West Coast levitation scam—looks askance at the Giant Peach of the Internet, aloft in Silicon Valley and around the globe, with James Clark, James Gosling, Netscape and a series of thin-air IPOs. Howard Anderson of Boston’s Yankee Group, long an Internet tout, thinks those wired yahoos on Wall Street and Sand Hill Road are blind to the inevitable sine waves of advance: What goes up must come down, he sternly avers, trying to bring some simple physics to the scene, as if the Internet has to obey the law of gravity. And now Bob Metcalfe—Metcalfe himself!—inventor of Ethernet, pioneer of ARPAnet and the founding father of the networking era. Here he is, prophesying lugubriously into every megaphone he can grasp, from the New York Times Magazine and PBS to U.S. News & World Report and InfoWorld, that the Internet will collapse in 1996. Metcalfe now predicts a general retreat to Intranets, shielded from the public system and unavailable to it. Et Tu, Bob? Metcalfe was striking a blow against the very solar plexus of my prophecies. I had founded my confidence in the Internet on the continuing power of the law of the telecosm, an edict adapted from Metcalfe’s very own law of networks. Metcalfe’s Law ordains that the value of a network rises by the square of the number of terminals attached to it. In its most basic form, this law merely captures the exponential rise in the value of any network device, such as a telephone, with the rise in the number of other such devices reachable by it. Metcalfe, however, shrewdly added in the declining cost of Ethernet adapters and other network gear as the Net expanded. In the law of the telecosm, I summed up these and other learning-curve factors by incorporating into Metcalfe’s Law the law of the microcosm. Based on the power-delay product in semiconductors, the law of the microcosm ordains that the cost-effectiveness of the terminals will rise by the square of the number of additional transistors integrated on a single chip. Amplified by the law of the microcosm, the law of the telecosm signifies the rise in the cost-effectiveness of a network in proportion to the resources deployed on it and the number of potential nodes and routers available to it. As the network expands, each new computer both uses it as a resource and contributes resources to it. This is the secret of the stability of the Internet. The very process of growth that releases avalanches of new traffic onto the Net precipitates a cascade of new capacity at Internet service providers (ISPs). They supply new servers and routers, open new routes and pathways for data across the Web, and buy new terminals and edge switches to upgrade their connections to the Network Access Points (NAPs), the Internet supernodes that in turn exert pressure on the backbone vendors to expand their own bandwidth. Because all these routes and resources are interlinked, they are available to absorb excess traffic caused by outages, crashes or congestion elsewhere on the Net. Because all these resources are growing in cost-effectiveness at the exponential pace of the law of the microcosm, and total available bandwidth on the Net is rising at the still-faster pace of the law of the telecosm, the Internet has been able to double in size annually since 1970 and increase its traffic two times faster still, without suffering any crippling crashes beyond the Morris worm of 1988. Impelling the growth of the largest interconnected network, the law of the telecosm means that the most open computer networks will prevail. Proprietary networks lose to a worldwide web. Loaded for Bear I wanted to answer Metcalfe’s challenger. As the apparent winner of a previous argument over ATM and Ethernet [see Forbes ASAP, “Metcalfe’s Law and Legacy,” Sept. 13, 1993], I thought I might have an edge (after all, Fast Ethernet outsells ATM at least 20 to 1). But when he met me on a rainy day late in May at his Boston townhouse on Beacon Street, where he looks benevolently across the Charles at the MIT campus, Metcalfe was loaded for Internet bear. At the peak of his influence, this smiling cover boy of June’s IEEE Spectrum, winner of the 1996 IEEE Medal of Honor, was ready to explain. “I am way out on a limb here,” he says over sushi and wasabi at a restaurant near his house. “I actually told a World Wide Web conference I would eat my column if the Internet didn’t collapse.... “What do I mean by a collapse? Well, the FCC requires telcos to report all outages that affect more than 50,000 lines for more than an hour. I mean something much bigger than that.” I suggested that with enough raw tuna and wasabi, his column would go down well. But Metcalfe was dead serious. The Internet will collapse and it will be good for us, and for the Net. “The collapse has a purpose. The Internet is currently in the clutches of superstition, promoted by a bio-anarchic intelligentsia, which holds that the Net is wonderfully chaotic and brilliantly biological, and homeopathically self-healing by processes of natural selection and osmosis. The purpose of the collapse will be to discredit this ideology. “What the Internet is—surprise, surprise—is a network of computers. It needs to be managed, engineered and financed as a network of computers rather than as an unfathomable biological organism.” Metcalfe’s intellectual targets are not hard to find. He dubs them the “Wired intelligentsia, epitomized by Nicholas Negroponte,” and, one supposes, author/editor Kevin Kelly and hippie mystic seer John Perry Barlow, celebrating a “neo-biological civilization out of control.” For example, at a recent meeting of NANOG (North American Network Operations Group), whenever Metcalfe brought up the problems of Internet management—the need for a settlements-and-payments process so that people who invest in the Net backbone can get their money back—”they kept telling me to get lost. | ||
