Debate: Can the Internet handle big breaking news?
It happens time and time again: when news breaks, the Internet slows.
It's quite obvious at this point that the Internet has muscled its way into the lives of anyone who needs information. And Michael Jackson's death Thursday had as great an impact on the Internet as anything in the history of the medium that didn't involve the World Trade Center.
Can a system that has trouble keeping up with ever-increasing demand for its services be considered a reliable source of information when a true crisis emerges? After an editor banished a budding argument between CNET News' Tom Krazit and Declan McCullagh from a company-wide mailing list, we decided to let them fight it out here.
Tom: How can any system that doesn't work precisely when people need it the most be considered the future of communications?
In a way, it took the death of perhaps the greatest entertainer of the last century to expose a key truth of this century: our new favorite communications tool, the Internet, buckles in times of crisis. News sites, including this one, were sluggish or completely offline at the peak of demand for information, forcing many to go back in time and flip on the television.
What if something really happens? How can companies trying to build information-related businesses on the Internet ever hope to supplant existing communications networks if they fail at the moment of truth? CNN's telecast didn't go down Thursday.
Declan: I think it's a little unfair to say the Internet "buckles in times of crisis." Sure, a few Web sites--Google News, The Los Angeles Times, TMZ, Yahoo, MSNBC--had slowdowns or outages. (That list includes our own CNET and CBS Interactive sites, which experienced serious problems for about half an hour.)
Some news Web sites slowing down or becoming unreachable for 30 minutes is not the same thing as the Internet "buckling." If an earthquake were to take out the trans-Pacific cable landings in California's Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, and Grover Beach, if car bombs knocked out MAE East and MAE West, and if a hurricane laid low the cable landings in Long Island and New Jersey, that might--might!--qualify.
In fact, yesterday's sad news about Michael Jackson demonstrated not the vulnerability, but the resilience of the modern Internet ecosystem. True, a few sites were having problems. But The Los Angeles Times' report about Jackson's coma, and its subsequent report about his death, were picked up and mirrored widely. Even if you couldn't get through to the Times, you could get through to innumerable blogs and others news sites citing it. Or you could just wait a few minutes for the traffic to die down.
Was this really such an inconvenience?
Tom: Ok, I'll concede the point about the broader Internet: near as I could tell, ICanHazCheeseburger.com was performing like a champ yesterday.
But this is a systemic problem with the Internet, or perhaps put more accurately, the Web. The more people who demand the service provided by an information Web site, the harder it gets for that site to provide that information. CNN/MSNBC/et al don't buckle when millions of people change the channel to watch O.J. meander down a Los Angeles freeway or the opening salvos of the Iraq War.
In an online world where businesses are spending billions trying to shift information consumption patterns onto the Web, how can these outages be tolerated? You're right, it's very easy to navigate elsewhere if you can't find what you are looking for on Site A. But if you can't depend on Site A in times of crisis, you're not going to go back there in future times of crisis, hurting the reputation of that site as a reliable source of information.
Even Google was unable to handle the load. And if Google can't, nobody can. This is a serious problem for online businesses, especially as people continue to come online in emerging economies and with mobile devices.
Akamai's visual representation of the effect demand for information about Michael Jackson had on the Internet Thursday.
(Credit: Akamai)Declan: I was using Google News pretty frequently during the time that Michael Jackson's fate was uncertain, and noticed no problems. Others, including some of our colleagues, did. I suspect that Google is using a different set of servers for Google News vs. its main search engine. So it's not so much that Google couldn't design a system to handle an unusual spike in traffic, but that it chose not to do so.
Let me put this argument another way: You said that the Internet "fail[s] at the moment of truth" but lauded "existing communication networks" that supposedly work just fine. Well, existing communication networks fail too. If more than a small fraction of telephone customers try to get a dial tone at once, there's a problem. Ever try to make a call on Mother's Day or with a cell phone at a conference? You're likely to get a fast busy signal or "all circuits are busy" message. Telephone companies could design for higher usage, but have chosen not to. They've figured out that the costs outweigh the benefits.
(Similarly, printed newspapers sell out very, very early on days like Election Day. Is this "fail[ing] at the moment of truth?")
It's really more of an economic than an engineering problem. Is it worth it to add an extra, say, threefold server and bandwidth capacity for that hour or so a year when it's needed? Or pay Akamai's overage charges? Probably not; the revenue may not cover the fees. So if your average rate is 100 users/sec, you might build for 1,000 users/sec max and then not be able to handle those once-a-year occasions when the rate is 5,000 users/sec.
An economist might say the solution to this situation is to ration by price. News pages might normally be free, but under times of high load, a micropayment would be charged. That way, the people who want or need the information the most would get it. Of course this means we need a micropayment infrastructure; I'm not holding my breath...
Tom: We're talking about how to respond to instant demand for information in the modern era. You're right, telephone networks can get overwhelmed. That's why we haven't used the telephone as the primary information source since "Thriller" was released.
Television doesn't get overwhelmed in these situations. The entire state of California could turn to CNN right now and nothing would flinch. If the entire state of California clicked on this story right now, our building might explode.
The Internet has choke points that will limit its ability to be the primary source of information to the world. Yet, companies continue to build businesses around the idea of the Internet as a dominant source of information to the world, neglecting the thorny networking problems that will only continue to get worse as traffic grows and our demand for real-time news increases.
Declan: Aha! I think we're nearing agreement.
We know that providing servers and purchasing bandwidth to handle millions of people an hour is expensive, and may not always scale well. One way to deal with this is to make it much easier for ad-supported news organizations to purchase overflow capacity; perhaps the additional revenue would justify the additional expense. If there's sufficient demand, I'm sure someone will come up with it if Akamai doesn't offer it already. Or news organizations could strip extraneous graphics off of their sites for that hour or so of peak usage--basically entering an emergency text-only mode. (Anyone still using the Lynx Web browser would love it!)
Another option is to recognize the limitations of the medium. Because radio and TV are broadcast, they'll always be more efficient at reaching hundreds of millions of people at once. So maybe CNN.com can't compete with CNN Headline News right now. But if the worst that happens is major news Web sites get a little slow for some 30 minutes a year, I'm not going to worry about The Death Of Online News; the Internet is robust and distributed enough that sufficiently important information about the next 9/11 attack will be distributed one way or another.
In other words, until we achieve technocratical perfection, there's nothing wrong with a bit of redundancy in our lives: keep that old transistor radio and some spare batteries around for a backup.
Tom: Seriously, we didn't even talk about the real Achillies Heel in this whole system: the power grid.
Not discounting your argument (in fact I agree with your premise), but most of the examples you gave aren't exactly the strongest.
Regards,
To answer your question, not a great deal, but than again what has Madonna done the in the past 20yrs? One would argue that they're pretty much the same when it comes to that question.
He cancel his date with Billy(age 11) and Joey (age 9).
We mock what we don't understand...
Only because he is a sideshow freak.
What little talent he had evaporated before 1990.
Record sales and chart numbers(which are totally fabricated) are meaningless.
there are people that have more talent then this guy had on his best day, yet will stay unknown.
Anyone can sing what others wrote and follow choreography. There is nothing talented about MJ.
When big news happens, word gets out. Even in MySpace game chat boards and numerous web forums, news reports were often being cut+pasted verbatim - often multiple times. I don't need to zero in on cnn.com, or faxnews.com, or CNET's site to read a big story - everyone else has pretty much passed it around by then, and I can read it from the comfort of my favorite blog/forum/chat-board/whatever. Yesterday's news spread a lot like a Linux distro did - it mirrored out organically, on its own.
Certainly there's a danger of getting bad info, but that's the same danger you find in television and even in print (though the latter is less likely to mess up since they have longer time buffers).
CNN was reporting that he was in a coma for the first hour or so. Fox was saying he was DOA (and got it right, mostly by guesser's luck IMHO).
By the six o'clock news, one was implicating prescription drug abuse, while another said he simply dropped dead, and a third said he had been sick since the day before for some odd reason, but they all more or less agreed on what the cause was, and that yes, he was in the current status of pushing daisies.
By the time the ten/eleven o'clock local news channels came on, the story had mostly gelled and was consistent across all channels, with few pertinent questions left unanswered (which would have to wait on the coroner anyway).
The morning paper? Well, they were able to get the story (mostly) straight, and even add some studied and (variable, but) carefully constructed insight into the mix.
Point is, The Internet, and even cable TV news, had happily out-stripped the flow of factual and accurate information, which in turn was disseminated widely with or without anyone seeing 404 errors in the process.
Even if televisions never existed, folks across the Internet knew within literally minutes that something was amiss, no matter how they originally got the information.The organic nature of the Internet allowed the information to spread rapidly in spite of server overloads, and in spite of (IMHO hyperbolic) claims that the Internet is overloaded and etc. I wouldn't be surprised at all if even the old USENET groups began getting the info and was cross-posting less than 10 minutes after it happened. In the world of spreading big news, that ain't half-bad.
Declan, you mentioned 'what if' on hurting the Internet. I daresay that it would be far easier to take out CNN and Fox News' broadcasting capabilities entirely and simultaneously, than it would to coordinate attacks on the MAEs and start slicing fiber lines all in one go. The centralized nature of television tends to leave a far more glaring nexus of 'what if' than anything on the Internet.
As for businesses trusting the public Internet to perform critical functions? Let me toss you both a monkey wrench: Only a damned fool would do it. Or, anyone doing so at least have enough redundancy built into said critical process, so that if Datacenter A became, say, a smoking meteor crater, Datacenter B would still be happily serving web pages. (see also related articles by the WSJ of their own backup and D/R plans, and how those kicked in (or didn't) shortly after 9/11 wiped out their main datacenter).
food for thought, anyway :)
But that's not the point of this article. I'm afraid Declan might be right here. It's a matter of the right tool for the job. Those "companies (that) continue to build businesses around the idea of the Internet as a dominant source of information to the world" are seriously mistaken. The internet is only one channel of communication. Just because some other channels are older, that doesn't make them useless! If these businesses put all their eggs in the internet basket, they surely will fail in the long run.
Television, however, has a legacy advantage in that massive spans of wireless bandwidth are legally dedicated to video broadcasting. If we handed those spectrum allocations to wireless service providers, it would accelerate the process of assimilating television into the internet. (We already made it digital anyway.)
It's like alternative power sources: When we need to switch, we will, but in the meantime, we'll take advantage of the preexisting infrastructure. That doesn't mean there's anything fundamentally wrong with the alternatives (solar / fusion / etc power, internet-based media delivery); they just didn't get grandfathered in (oil / television).
Yes it's true, he didn't write all his hits, but neither do any other entertainer. People don't enjoy a song because of who wrote it, they enjoy it because of who sang and performed it. Rod Temperton wrote the song Thriller but nobody goes around calling it Rod Temperton's Thriller. Rod Temperton's wasn't the one who sang the songs or danced the moonwalk. Likewise, nobody identifies the Elvis songs "Don't Be Cruel", "All Shook Up" or "Return to Sender" as Otis Blackwell's. It was never Otis Blackwell's voice causing girls in the 50's to swoon or his hips gyrating up on stage.
Songs are always associated to the performer who made it famous, not the writer. Those of you who are just splitting hairs trying to argue the true musical talent are just being petty.
if you ever duke it out again ! post it!
both amazing points that are valid
the internet handled the death of Jeff Golblum yesterday in fine fashion.
TV is a stupid comparison. Because it doesn't matter if 1 or 1 billion people tune in....there is no "pipe" to each user. You can't design such a system for computer data because when someone connects, they expect to be able to watch / read / listen to whatever they want on demand. TV you have no control over what you are going to see when it comes on. They might be near the end of the story you need to know about, or they may not be covering it yet.
The 2 types of systems are opposites of each other. One can handle a nearly unlimited number of users, but doesn't give them any control over what they see (other than changing channels), the other gives complete control in that you can see whatever you want when you want from the beginning.
The issue could be mitigated at the wider network level, rather than having thousands of servers sit idle at every major Internet publishing company, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of incentive (yet) for telcos to do that.
Maybe the answer is that there needs to be something in the middle, something that gives more control over the consumption than television but is less demanding than the Internet?
Alternatively I think peer to peer networks could distribute the load of getting content out if needed.
It seems in most cases these websites should just offer a text only page that is cacheable when they can't otherwise handle the load - since this only seems to have happened about twice this decade (the other being September 11th). These sites could also be better prepared by having mirrors in quickly scalable cloud systems such as Amazon's S3/EC2 or slicehost etc.
Article became useless when the flow of logic went to comparing how a one-way flow of information (television) is compared to a 2-way (Internet). And even then it didn't even consider for load to a system like television broadcasting which would had to expand to cover a wider audience.
Let's just put this article and discussion away, CNET editors.
These are separate issues but yet you guys don't seem to understand the difference between bringing down the internet and bringing down Google.
- by bvdon June 27, 2009 3:49 PM PDT
- MJ most certainly was the greatest entertainer of the 20th century. It's not so much a measure of talent as it is distribution. Just how famous was MJ compared to the others? I think it is fairly safe to say that MJ is better known across the globe than all others mentioned.
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