POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Obamadmin Has Plans for the Internet

If you're not using feedly, you should check it out. I almost never visit my Google Reader page anymore, as a result of having loaded it up. It's part of an interesting feedback loop. If you use feedly, you can open up full articles or portions without leaving the page, forward the links in email, post directly to Twitter or other social media sites, recommend, etc. Generally, I hop on in the morning and boot whatever I think is important to Twitter, kicking the information out there, sometimes with a meme-fashioning note, often without. I send videos and other relevant information via email to The B-Cast so they can choke on it over their coffee, and I remark on whatever seems most relevant or likely not to be covered by Malkin, Hot Air, Ace and the other sites our readers are likely to follow, here.

Some of the sources that I include in the feed are places that I wouldn't bother to visit on a regular basis. I include these because it's important to know what one's ideological opponents are on about and how they are deploying the information. Michael Yon might consider this part of getting into someone's OODA loop. At any rate, there's a site called DProgram.net that I include in my feeds. It's full of Truther nonsense, and it has a section devoted to comparisons of Bush 43 to Nazis, just to give you a taste of what's there, but sometimes its paranoia matches up with mine.

That was the case this morning when they linked to a GAO report that includes a long section on the strains liable to be placed upon the internet infrastructure by a pandemic. At the 40% absenteeism mark, demand for various kinds of information on the internet would begin to exceed its capacity to supply information, and could lead to internet brownouts. So, the question posed by the report is, how are the DHS and the FCC positioned to deal with such an event? Providers state that technically it would be possible for them to slow the speeds at which they supply information, but that this might place them in violation of the terms of their contracts with users, so that any such action would have specifically to be mandated by the federal government. Also, it's important that the FCC and DHS coordinate their activities in this regard so as not to send contradictory signals to service providers.

Part of what's most interesting about this report is the way in which it suggests that future iterations of the internet may be able simply to prioritize which sites are given the most bandwidth for their feeds. Naturally, government communications are of the highest importance under this scenario, but more than that it will depend on DHS and the FCC 'scoring' the relative informational value of various websites and services. In the interim, the report says, it may be necessary to shut down certain popular sites on an ad hoc basis in order to guarantee the stability of the system. In other words, the projected flu pandemic is being used as a test-case hypothetical scenario in which to contemplate how best to effect a targeted regime of censorship.

You may access the GAO report (pdf) here. The relevant section begins at page 19.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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