The web as a medium, compared to television or other platforms, has its own particular set of problems. The restrictions mainly lie in the technology behind it.

Ultimately, the internet is built on a "many-to-many" principle; instead of one pathway between any two points on the network, there are many alternatives. Where many pathways converge at a single point, there can be problems.

Server Strain

A site like YouTube can certainly provide television-like content, and the distinction between online video like YouTube and television broadcasts are being blurred; devices such as the Apple TV, which send YouTube videos directly to a television set, while IPTV provides television broadcasts over the internet.

However, even YouTube would probably struggle to provide a single live, nationwide or global event in the way that television can.

The most watched YouTube videos have yet (at the time of writing) to break the 60 million views mark- that’s the total number of people across the world who have watched it over the course of 18 months. Compare that to record breaking TV broadcasts, such as the Eastenders Christmas 1986 episode when 30.15 million viewers simultaneously watched Den Watts divorce Angie in the highest rated soap in British TV history, or when 32 million households watched the 1966 world cup final. (Although even these figures pale in comparison with the most watched film, with an estimated 2 billion views worldwide.)

Nobody (outside some serious NDAs) knows how many servers YouTube or Google have or how their server software has been designed, so it’s hard to guess how they would handle large numbers of simultaneous hits to the same content. However, the bandwidth that every one of the UKs Internet households would require would probably cripple exchanges before Googles servers had a chance to deal with the challenge. A typical household might have signed up to a 4-8Mb connection, but tests reveal that broadband speeds are significantly less than advertised in the UK, especially when the networks are busy.

Even without the high load from streaming video, large websites can still be crippled when many people try to access them at once; such as in September this year when 25 million tried to register to buy tickets for a one-off Led Zepplin reunion concert. Even though the tickets were being sold on a lottery basis rather than "first come, first served", there were still as many as 100,000 hits per minute on the servers— enough to put them out of action. (In fact, such events are very similar to a typical Denial of Service attack; where a website or server is deliberately flooded with connection attempts, making "genuine" connections impossible.)

Packet Filtering and Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality has been a hot topic in the U.S. for a while now, probably made most famous by Senator Ted Steven’s “series of tubes” metaphor (probably better known as a running joke on The Daily Show than an accurate summary of a technological problem.)

The debate is over whether “Net Neutrality” regulation should be passed, forbidding ISPs from filtering network traffic. At the moment, there is no legal or technical reason why ISPs cannot prioritise or block particular types of internet traffic so that, for example, one ISP might provide online video that they provide themselves (or provided from their affiliates) at faster download speeds than a competitor’s content, or particular applications or technologies could be blocked completely (for example, if an ISP decided to slow down internet traffic for the iTunes Music Store that travelled through it’s networks, in favour of it’s own music sales platform), creating what’s referred to as a ‘tiered internet’.

Much of the argument mainly revolves around whether or not the internet (much of which has been publically funded) is a public service, and should be regulated in the same way as services such as television or telephone.

It’s not just Senator Stevens who comes across looking slightly ridiculous, talking around a technological subject that they don’t appear to fully understand. For example, apparently, NBC have spotted an unusual angle in the debate, and have argued that peer to peer filesharing costs corn farmers money; the logic behind the argument being that if people don’t go to the cinema, choosing instead to stay at home to watch downloaded video, then they aren’t buying overpriced popcorn to eat while they watch the films, which of course is bad for the farmers who grow the corn (presumably even more so than the theatres selling stale popcorn at a hugely inflated price.)

The issue is further muddied by the changing business interests of some service providers; while just a few years ago, broadband providers who were offering high speed internet access were obviously popular with users who downloaded large amounts of data. While this data may or may not have included illegal music or video downloads, it didn’t conflict with the interests of the telecommunications companies who were providing the internet service, so they were more than happy to remain tight-lipped about how their customers were using their services, citing privacy issues when asked.

More recently though, as bandwidths have increased enough for streaming media and VOIP technology to become more widely usable, this has created a conflict of interest for telecommunications companies who are effectively providing a cheaper alternative to their own telephone services.

The issue of bandwidth seems to be on the verge of becoming a significant issue in the UK. Bandwidth-intensive online video is becoming increasingly popular, with YouTube now a household name, BBC’s iPlayer in it’s public beta and Channel 4′s 4OD having been released, the line between television and online video is becoming increasingly blurred, with the apparent goal of online delivery channels replacing home video recorders. Both these new players involve a networking tool, where videos (or parts of videos) are downloaded from other users, rather than a central server.

However, this means that instead of the main strain being on the content provider, it is spread across the network; instead of users simply downloading data, they are also uploading data to other users. While this is unlikely to have a noticable effect on the individual users, it will have a more noticable impact on ISPs.

Public Enemy Number One: The Public.

The main target of network filtering seems to be peer-to-peer traffic. Peer-to-peer systems are based on the idea of spreading the load over a network; for example, instead of 50 people downloading the same file from a single server (resulting in a high load both on the server and on it’s available bandwidth), users can download either parts of the file or the entire file from other users who have already downloaded it from the server, easing the load. It came to prominence with the attention that the Napster network and related legal cases brought, as well as a number of similar networks (such as Kazaa, bittorrent networks etc.); because there often wasn’t any centralised server in such peer-to-peer networks, it was difficult for copyright holders to attack the networks, and instead had to deal with individual users. This has given peer-to-peer technologies a reputation of being used for illegal downloads of music, films and software, as well as giving organisations like the RIAA an (in some cases, justified) reputation for harshly cracking down on individuals.

However, there are a number of perfectly legal applications for peer to peer technologies; the Skype VOIP service uses peer to peer technologies, as do the BBC and 4OD’s online video distribution channels. Bittorrents are very popular for the distribution of free software, as they don’t require costly servers to deliver the software, relying instead on the cooperation of users.

At it’s most straightforward level, filtering involves checking each packet of data to see what sort of data it is, and then processing some sorts differently from others. For example, much like a firewall might be set up to block data which isn’t either from the web or part of a recognised email system, an ISP might set up a filter to block (or throttle) traffic on a similar set of rules. Not a problem for a user who only uses the web and email, but a significant problem if they decide to legally download some music from somewhere like iTunes, or play a game of Counter Strike (a game which at one point was said to generate more internet traffic than the whole of Italy.)

Because of the way the internet works, the throttled traffic might instead find an alternative, faster path across the network, increasing the load on other parts of the network which aren’t applying such rules. As a result, the internet could fall victim to the tragedy of the commons (a social trap where a finite resource is diminished because of how individuals treat it; best illustrated by the example of farmers keeping cattle on a piece of shared land; if one farmer increases the number of cattle they keep on the land, the quality of the land is diminished as more animals are grazing; although the negative effect is felt equally by all the farmers, the gain is only experienced by the farmer who is keeping more cattle.)

The decentralised nature of the internet means that it’s difficult to get an accurate picture of what the traffic on the internet is made up of; (because there’s no central server or exchange point that all traffic goes through, where traffic can then be monitored from— the subject of a future post), but there are estimates that peer-to-peer filesharing traffic is responsible for at least 50%, and possibly as much as 90% of all internet traffic. Others argue that HTTP is the majority of traffic- especially since the advent of YouTube.