Once people and institutions installed their connection to the Internet, they were free to play with it. Electronic mail, file exchanges, databases, network games -- no matter what you did, the price never seemed to go up. When friends in a physics lab invited me in the mid-1980s to play adventure games on the DARPAnet, I didn't think for a second about whether the games originated at their home computer or on the other side of the country. We just stayed in front of the screen for hours, typing our way through the story. Some of the researchers had been playing for months and had been having a terrific time.
The freebie tradition continues to this day. Pay your hourly or daily or monthly access fee, and it doesn't matter whether you are spending the time sending short, valuable E-mail messages to a computer one mile away or downloading a huge pornographic pic-ture from a computer in Bangladesh. Users act like kids let loose in the mall. Running from one place to another, they buy and buy until every cent is gone. Except that on the Internet, there's nothing to halt the process. There's an endless supply of kids, and all the goods are for free. There's no reason to stop until the mall is looted and the buildings have collapsed beneath their feet.
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In 1975 an unknown country-and-western artist known as C. W. McCall zoomed to the top of the charts with "Convoy," a song about the then-new technology of citizens-band radio. It helped to create a nationwide mania for CB -- one that, in retrospect, makes Internet experts nervous. Like the Internet, CB had no central brain and nobody in charge. Like the Internet, it provided instant, unregulated access to an invisible community. And like the Internet, it was free, more or less. People could use it as much as they wanted after they paid an entrance fee, in this case, the price of a CB. "The result was incredible radio congestion," says Jim McConnaughey. "It apparently reduced the quality of communications so substantially that most people stopped using it."
McConnaughey is a member of the Universal Service Working Group of the Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF), a federal-government task force overseen by the White House. The IITF is one of many groups working to prevent the Internet from being loved to death. "I, too, am torn," McConnaughey says. "I like free things as much as the next guy. And once you figure out how to get on the Internet, you're a kid in the candy store -- you're 'free to surf around.' In addition, easy and inexpensive access could be a real boon to kids for educational reasons. But the easier and cheaper you make access, the more potential you have for the system to be mobbed."
The White House set up the IITF in 1993 partly because the appearance of Mosaic and other easy-to-use Internet explorers that year were drastically increasing the number of people on-line. In addition, the near-simultaneous wave of enthusiasm for multimedia applications made it clear that every one of those new users would have the power to suck up vast stores of computing power. Sending a word from one computer to another typically means transmitting about 50 of what the digital-pulses engineers call "bits." Sending a picture typically means transmitting about 500,000 bits, a much bigger but still manageable number. But a typical second of video uses up a staggering 50 million bits. When it was first set up, NSFnet -- the link between the nation's most advanced supercomputers -- had a transmission capacity of 100 million bits a second. In other words, the entire network would have been able to carry two Rolling Stones videos.
Capacity has increased manyfold since then, but the specter of the negative synergy between the rising number of Internet users and the appeal of multimedia has network experts wringing their hands. "The average load is not the problem," says Hal Varian, a University of Michigan economist who has written widely about the Internet. "Most of the time the Net is working at maybe 5% of capacity. But the peak load is a major concern. Service begins to degrade at about 20% of capacity, and a sudden upsurge can make demand jump to that point in an instant."
The Internet, in other words, is like an electric utility. Most of the time, there's plenty of power for everybody. But when thousands of tired commuters come home on a hot summer afternoon and switch on the air-conditioning, the lights suddenly dim. To prevent Internet brownouts, vendors will have to install a lot of equipment; in the long run the bill may run to billions of dollars. But, Varian says, the increase in capacity will lead to an increase in demand, in much the way that building new power facilities encourages people to buy more air conditioners. And, of course, someone will have to pay for that equipment.
Explosive growth in demand may happen sooner than anyone expects, according to Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp. With complaints of delays already frequent, the release in April of Real Audio Player software, which enables real-time audio broadcasts over the Internet, may tax the system enormously. "Religious broadcasters will grab onto it, as is their right," says Kapor, who is now at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But can you imagine the strain on the system when millions of worshipers find out they can listen to Billy Graham live on their computers?" Kapor thinks the increased demand will ultimately foster the growth of the Internet, but others are not so sure. Projections from the nonprofit Internet Society predict that unless new protocols are adopted the system's routing computers, which direct traffic throughout the Net, may be overwhelmed by 1997.
To economists like Varian, the solution is to impose prices. Economists love prices because they make everyone sensitive to costs. Consumers are encouraged to clean up their acts by not hogging the lines with frivolous requests for the hundreds of pictures of Austrian beer labels that a suds fan has stashed on-line. Vendors are encouraged to clean up their acts by providing high-quality services that will attract paying consumers. When usage is priced, resources are allocated efficiently and rationally -- qualities in short supply at the moment.
