Internet Buzz with Richard Wiggins | 23

The Starr Report: Old Media Bows Before the Internet

The rush to publish the report in all its salacious glory was replete with irony:

• Any Internet ratings of this report would place it off-limits for children to read. About one hour after initially posting the report, CNN appended to its beginning a sort of "parental guidance suggested" notice.
• Henry Hyde, one of the proponents of the Communications Decency Act, reportedly said "We cannot publish this report on the Internet – it is pornographic!" (Note to Mr. Hyde: the CDA was overturned by the Supreme Court; fear not.) Every member of the House who once voted for the CDA and on Friday voted to rush this report onto the Net in unexpurgated form has been rendered a total hypocrite.
• As Jay Leno observed, President Clinton must rue the day he took on Al Gore's challenge to put the Internet into every classroom. Also, while Clinton muses in introspection, he might also contemplate the fact that he readily signed the CDA, and now text that would've violated the CDA is the most widely read document on the Net – and it describes his own acts.
• Ken Starr – a pretty conservative guy, one assumes – must've also felt a twinge of remorse at providing prose that reads like torrid fiction for the nation's youth to peruse online.

Think of the Starr report as a "mass attention event." Millions of people nationwide are simultaneously turning their attention to a single event, and they turn to all their favorite media outlets for information. The Internet is now fully a part of the mix.

Before the publishing of the Starr report online, a number of folks predicted the Net would crash on Friday. Afterwards, some news reports claim the Net did just fine.

Both are wrong.

It's very hard for any event to take down the entire Internet. IP networking was designed, after all, for military applications, and Internet routers are very good at routing around congestion or dead network links.

So there was never much chance that the rush of the drooling masses to house.gov would "bring down the Internet." But it overstates things greatly to claim that the Internet handled the demands on it quite handily. If that were true, everyone would've gotten a report within seconds after clicking on it. It's pretty clear that the Net didn't deliver by that measure:

• I was unable to reach the house.gov site at any time between 3:00 and 5:00 pm Eastern time on Friday. Traceroutes revealed packets weren't getting far beyond their upstream New York link.
• Major media Web sites such as MSNBC had to post "Server is overloaded" notices at various times during the afternoon.
• At least one major university saw a major increase in traffic on Friday. Doug Nelson, network administrator at Michigan State University, tells me that Internet link utilization was up by 30% that afternoon. Friday afternoon was unusually sunny and warm, and the day before a football Saturday; you'd expect a 30% drop, not an increase. Although the university does not and would not track where users go, it's a safe bet many users were looking for the report online.
• Traffic statistics for MAE East, a major Internet routing exchange point on the East coast, show that on September 11 there was a visible bump in the utilization curve ; however, the increase didn't greatly distort the normal utilization pattern, which peaks at about 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. To some extent, increase in traffic understates the problems; if a potential reader failed in his or her first attempt to reach a server, that user might go away without transferring several megabytes of data.

Note that the Starr report was completely textual. The previous high-water mark for mass attention on Net documents was the Mars Pathfinder landing; JPL servers experienced record transaction rates as millions of people requested text and photographs over several days. If we experience a mass-attention event that has the concentrated level of interest of the Starr report – plus the graphics-rich content of the Pathfinder site – expect for more serious breakdowns.

All this reveals an important architectural shortcoming of the Internet in general and the Web in particular. We need a simple and pervasive mechanism for automatic replication or mirroring of content. Each major media site, from CNN to MSNBC to The New York Times, scrambled to download the report and mirror it by hand. There is no reason why the Internet couldn't perform this service automatically.

Every ISP, university, K-12 school, and corporate network should be running a caching proxy Web server, which would be a good start. That doesn't completely solve the problem, as each user chooses which site to try to find the same document on. The idea of automated mirroring is quite old now, and the technology is available. What we lack is standards for identifying and replicating to multiple caching servers a given piece of content, and pervasive implementation of those standards.

Today, if 10,000 people tune into MSNBC, or 10,000,000 people do, NBC and its affiliates do not feel the difference until the ratings come in. In a sense that is the definition of a broadcast network – the network can deliver as broadly as imaginable without breaking down. The Internet and the Web are well suited to single-user or narrowcast applications, and poorly suited to broadcast. When will we see real solutions deployed?

While the Internet didn't perform as well as we might dream, the delivery of the report did offer new ways for Internet firms to show originality. Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, AltaVista used machine translation to offer the report on six languages. You can read the report in whatever language you prefer; you can even search in English and read in German.

Whatever the next mass-interest event is, you can bet the Internet will play a vital and visible role in getting the word out. Who knows, we may see Clinton's videotaped testimony in the Jones case on television as well as in RealVideo over the Web. The question is, will the old media continue to try to do the things the Internet does best, or will they do the things that they do best?