Why is Australia’s Channel 7 making our jobs harder?

There are several misconceptions about the Internet. For example, some believe that that the Internet is a very light black box about the size of a handbag with a single light, where the Elders of the Internet keep watch over it from Big Ben.

I never get tired of linking to that video. In fact, the entire TV show “The IT crowd” is based around the idea that to most of the world, networking is a mystery, the Internet a “magic” box that gives you sneezing pandas on demand, and no one cares. Until, of course, it’s time to PANIC!

In Australia, Channel Seven’s “Sunrise” morning news show had a computer expert with, Pete Blasina, talking about how the Internet is “filling up.”

According to the news report, a report where the anchor freely admits that he “doesn’t know how this Internet business works, I thought it just went through the air,” I “learned” the following things:

• Scientists (who are not named in the piece) are warning that video sharing sites such as YouTube are putting a “major strain on cyberspace.”
• By 2012, the Internet could get “full.”
• Blasina is surprised that the Internet hasn’t “run out of space” earlier, and the fact that it hasn’t done so is “remarkable.”
• The Internet is about 13 years old, and it hasn’t broken down once. (For those counting, that means the Internet was invented in 1996.)
• The Internet is probably “the most perfect machine we’ve built as humans.” (It clearly outshines, of course, the lever, inclined plane, wheel and axle, screw, wedge, or pulley.)
• With “video going down the Internet, and so much entertainment and social networking, it’s virtually at capacity now.”
• “It’s called Cyberspace, so we think it just appears out of the air.”
• The problem with The Internet being “full” is not the pipes, because “the pipes are fine.”
• “Optic fiber is infinitely extensible.”
• “The issue is that all the information has to be resident somewhere.”
• “The issue is with the switches that transmit down the fiber connection.”
• “There are massive server farms, or computer farms, where the information is resident. And that’s where the clog happens.”
• “We almost now are at the point where we need to go back down to the foundation and rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up.”

At the risk of insulting Australia Channel Seven’s news staff, this is frozen concentrated stupid juice.

Seriously, if this wasn’t an actual news show, it would sound like an Onion skit.

The segment goes on for four minutes and in that time, the expert asserts the Internet will become “full” but doesn’t quite explain why, blaming YouTube and video applications for the problem, then blaming server storage space for the problem, then blaming problems with delay in the switches, then goes back full circle and talks about YouTube and other video applications and the massive amounts of data they deal with.

Now, as a network performance vendor, one of the reasons we have an end-to-end solution and integrated suite of tools is because we’ve heard of situations where problems are first blamed on the network group, then on the server group, then on the application group. However, this is the first time I’ve seen a single person flip single-handedly from one to the other to the next. And, like adding a marichino cherry on this banana split of confusion, he does it all without actually mentioning what the problem is.

He doesn’t even mention who is saying the Internet is getting full by 2012. “Who” is literally the first thing taught in journalism school, followed by the next five things, “What, When, Where, Why, and How.”

It is bad enough that there is so much complex information out there that is misunderstood and mishandled. Oversimplification is one thing, but at least oversimplification tells you what the problem is and a simple, easy to understand, wrong solution. I don’t even know what the hell the problem is or what they’re trying to say. I’d offer to summarize and re-write it to explain the problem, but I don’t even have enough information to even do that.

But I can get outraged about it because I know enough about computers to know that that was pure nonsense; what worries me is that “the internet will get full” becomes conventional wisdom because that’s all that the non-savvy TV viewer will take away from this piece. After all, Blasina must know what he’s talking about, because “he’s on television.”

And while I’ve never been on TV, I have acted in Pete Blasina’s capacity, not just as editor of this blog and contributor to HardOCP. I’ve also been a tech expert on the Marcus Lush radio programme in New Zealand, and have been interviewed by the New York Times TechTalk podcast.

Maybe I need a pink Hawaiian shirt.