Telepocalypse

OPINION://Wal-Mart and the Internet

As a foreign body in the USA, when I first came to live here I couldn't help notice some recurring themes. A lot of places sell a lot of really cheap stuff -- cheap food, cheap clothes, cheap cars, cheap houses. And when you buy something, it tends to be physically large. I'm not saying you always get a lot out of it at the end, because sometimes that largeness is filled with air, soy protein, high fructose corn syrup and styrofoam. But always large. And consistently crap. Out of date food on the supermarket shelves. New cars that look like the height of 80's fashion and with the durability of a wet paper bag. T-shirts that turn to rags on their first wash and dye all the rest of your clothes pink in the process. Enormous houses that have less durability than my parents' garden shed back in London.

Cheap. Crap. And lots of it. The driving force of the world's largest economy. Just look at Wal-Mart. "Always low prices", my arse! "Cheap, crap and lots of it! Come on in and load up in Sam's place!". Just look at the prices, never mind the real cost.

Which brings us to our old friend, the Internet. In many ways this is the Wal-Mart of data communications. It's hideously inefficient at real-time communications. Every penis extending spam packet needs to be delivered at the same speed as my webcam with the oldies back home. You end up using a lot more of it dealing with waste and breakage than if you'd bought something decent in the first place. It's truly awful in terms of efficiency at managing jitter and routing: look at how Skype sends your data stream over multiple simultaneous routes in the hope of something getting there in a timely fashion. We end up building endless patches to deal with the lack of hooks into the analog world and things like identity infrastructures. Every spammer and DDoS fiend is anonymous because nobody thought of creating a governance mechanism to deal with abuse of an IP address.

But it's really simple. And thus has a very low cost to turn standards into hardware and software that universally interoperates. Despite the technical horror of the whole edifice, it does deliver real-time video and voice in a reasonably reliable fashion. And it's economic efficiency has led it to fill every data delivery nook and cranny around.

It's easy to get on a high horse and say that we should have a "better" open network, with channel reservations, jitter and latency guarantees, etc. You may also think that shoppers at Wal-Mart would be "better off" not buying supersize packs of Doritos Cardiac Arrest Flavor and unstimulating plastic kiddies toys. Yet the economic reality is that Wal-Mart is the ultimate shopping monster and the Internet is the ultimate data monster. Cheap. Crap. And lots of it. It's the American way.