The truth about networks

On Monday, Michael Hennessy posted a tweet that pointed to a piece in the Financial Times called “Net Neutrality: Time for Evidence-Based Policy”.

In that article, Thomas Hazlett exposes a significant flaw in a NY Times OpEd penned by University of Michigan academic (and former special assistant to President Obama) Susan Crawford.

Obama economic adviser Susan Crawford, arguing in the New York Times for broadband re-regulation, said that ending government DSL mandates was “a radical move… [that] produced a wave of mergers,” raising prices and lowering quality.

It is simply untrue.

Read the pieces.

That same day, I was bothered by a statement in a CANARIE press release issued to talk about University of Toronto digitizing half a million books for the Internet Archive:

The University of Toronto library team sends approximately one terabyte of data, in the form of scanned books, per day to the Internet Archive via the CANARIE network. A terabyte is one trillion bytes of data, equivalent to 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. This data transfer would not be possible on the commercial Internet, as the size of these files would take up too much bandwidth and potentially bring down the network.

I was struck by this statement. CANARIE has a fraction of the capacity of a number of the commercial national networks in Canada. There are commercial applications that are sending those volumes of data every day.

With the downturn in the traditional media sector, we don’t seem to see enough attention being paid to checking facts the way they did in the ‘old days’. It means that readers have to be more vigilant in challenging sources.