FITUG e.V.
Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
FITUG e.V.Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft |
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http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/02/biztech/articles/14digi.html
February 14, 2000
DIGITAL COMMERCE
Mergers Threaten Internet's Informal System of Data Exchange
By DENISE CARUSO
ast week's Web site attacks were a vivid reminder that technology's sword of individual empowerment has a wicked double edge. But the term for the attack technique -- denial of service -- has the potential to assume an equally ominous meaning as telecommunications giants continue to merge their large holdings.
[...]
But that is scarcely true today. It may be even less true tomorrow: upon completion of the Worldcom-Sprint merger, a single company would control nearly half of the Internet's backbone -- making it, literally and figuratively, without peer.
Given the furious pace and high stakes of the telecommunications industry today, some fear that it is only a matter of time before one big backbone provider or another refuses to exchange data traffic with one of its peers.
What happens then?
"Well, they would have a legitimate excuse," says Hal Varian, dean of the school of information management at the University of California at Berkeley. "An ISP could complain, and rightly so, that another ISP was sending them huge amounts of traffic and putting a load on their system."
But then, Varian says, they could also decrease the capacity of "their side of the network so their own traffic is getting swamped."
"That's an excuse to say, 'We can't handle this guy's packets; we aren't going to connect with him,'" he added.
[...]