Court's Blog: Here’s To A Faster Internet

It’s early Friday morning and I am riding my bicycle over the Collier Bridge headed towards Veterans Blvd. I notice that the bridge bike lanes that are normally filled with broken glass, insulation, parts of coolers, chunks of wood etc from the thousands of vehicles that cross everyday are almost free of debris. I believe there is a schedule that the City has established to sweep the bridge clean every so often. It makes my passage over the bridge much easier and faster as I don’t have to bob and weave around the stuff that would puncture a tire or worse.

There is the same type of problem with the Internet. In the United States some have estimated there are 240 thousand terabytes of data moving across the Internet each month. A terabyte is equal to one million bytes. As they travel, bits and bytes fall by the wayside and can remain stuck in the Internet forever. Here are some statistics that lend support to that statement.

Mary Madden writing for Pew/Internet, reports their latest survey, fielded February 15 – April 6, 2006 shows that fully 73% of respondents (about 147 million adults in the US alone) are internet users.

The website About, reports there are 171 billion messages per day which means almost 2 million emails are sent every second. About 70% to 72% (or between 120 and 123 billion) of them are spam and viruses. The genuine emails are sent by around 1.1 billion email users.

An article posted by CNN says the Internet is littered with abandoned sites. There are even more dead sites that just display a 404 message. (Site not found). Don’t forget the millions of ads, pop ups and other visual and audio events that occur on the web every day.

A report produced by Deloitte is claiming that we will suffer noticeable Internet bottlenecks this year. This will be due to a lack of investment in the infrastructure coupled with an exponential growth in video traffic. Bottlenecks are likely to become apparent in some of the Internet's backbones, the terabit-capable pipes exchanging traffic between continents.

So what happens to all the email that doesn’t get delivered? How can abandoned websites be allowed to take up precious bandwidth, server time and space? Millions of files are uploaded and downloaded from the Web every day, what happens to video downloads or uploads that don’t finish? Where does all this flotsam and jetsam end up? As we attempt to maneuver the Internet, all these bits and bytes, stuck in Internet orbit around the world, work to slow down our valid Internet traffic.

Thanks to an arm of the United Nations, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) we will be seeing some relief and hopefully a general increase in the speed with which information flows on the World Wide Web.

The ITU commissioned brilliant programmer Lirpa Sloof to lead a team in the construction of seventeen massive cyber bots. Think of these as gigantic robots but instead of being constructed of metal and electronics, the cyber bots are essentially massive programs that consist of complicated mathematical algorithms, and AI. (Artificial intelligence) It will be the responsibility of these cyber bots to travel over the entire Internet in a twenty-four hour period, scrubbing dead websites, email, broken links, failed up and down loads etc. To enable these ‘bots” to effectively clean the Internet, the United Nations has divided the world into project areas assigned to specific groups so the cyber bots can be tracked and areas deemed cleansed before they move on to the next. Charlotte County where I live, falls under the Authorized Peace River Internet Laundering group.

To facilitate this Internet cleaning, the United Nations has issued a directive that will cause the Internet to be completely shut down from midnight March 31, 2012 to 12:01 a.m. April 2, 2012. Additionally, it is recommended that all computers with Internet access be shut off as well, to prevent the chance that cyber bots might enter a computer and wipe it clean if dead or unused material were found.

As each cyber bot completes an assigned project area, another group of scientist will undertake a verification and inspection of each cleaned area. This group, named the Final Overview of Operational Links and Systems will then certify the success of the cyber bots.

Since the Internet will be down during this period, I look forward to the traditional print media keeping us apprised of the progress and success of the cyber bots. I am sure that the two groups responsible for this massive undertaking, Authorized Peace River Internet Laundering (A.P.R.I.L) and Final Overview of Operational Links and Systems (F.O.O.L.S) will release regular progress reports.

Here’s to a faster Internet.