To translate this concern of the GAO, what they're saying is that if too many people stay home and use the internet, Wall Street might not be able to function smoothly. Therefore, in order to protect Wall Street (because as you know, our government does everything possible to bail out Wall Street), the feds might need to shut down some popular websites.
But where, exactly, is all the bandwidth usage really coming from? Twitter uses virtually no bandwidth, given that it's a short, text-based messaging service. Text articles also don't use up much bandwidth. In terms of clogging the internet's "series of tubes" (to use a hilarious term coined by a U.S. Senator), the real culprits are videos. While a Twitter text message might be less than 1k in size, a typical video is 350MB, or roughly 350,000 times larger than a Twitter message.
So where, exactly, are people getting video downloads? The most popular non-porn video destinations today are MySpaceTV.com, YouTube.com, LiveLeak.com, Yahoo Video and Hulu.com. But as it turns out, even these highly popular websites may not account for most internet traffic.
No comments:
Post a Comment