Is the Internet brownout even an issue worth discussing?
Barrett Lyon: I’ve always said the Internet is a big piece of duct tape. It’s an amazing experiment, but the protocols are very antiquated and very old. We’ve proven the experiment very well and we can use a digital network to do these things. We have learned a lot about scale and security. As a result, all of these products are duck tape around these old protocols. My personal point of view is — as a community and a general rule of thumb — we could do a lot better. We’re trying to think around problems and continue progression. I really do truly believe that Internet video and content is going to drive technology for the next 10 to 15 years. Bandwidth will be driven by content [while] chips and routers are driven by capacity requirements. C: So how does this relate to brownouts? BL: I guess if you think in terms of “We need this much capacity to serve this much video and what we’ll need in the coming years,” I could see why people might think the Internet would have these brownout c
