Tech | July 30, 2008 | 6 comments

Bandwidth is the oil of the information economy

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/opinion/30wu.html?ex=1218081600&en=1889dcb7333a8838&ei=507...

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sustainablejohn
Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.

Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.

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The article goes on to discuss how we can take back the airwaves and create our own bandwidth sources, similar to putting solar panels up to create our own energy.

Isn't Google going to provide the internet to everyone in the world for free one day, solidifying their hold in world domination?
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6 comments // Bandwidth is the oil of the information economy

  • Frier_peppino
  • itdango
  • Pattyhax
    • 0
      Pattyhax  

    • Similar to energy usage, we could concentrate on using bandwidth more efficiently by using better programming and improving the technology of network devices.

      It seems the lessons we're learning from our energy crisis may better prepare us for different problems down the road.

    • 3 years ago
  • J_Jammer
  • twodee
    • 0
      twodee  

    • excellent post John. This is something we should be looking at across the board. We have let a small group of people control energy from the start of the industrial revolution. For example, the Sun casts down onto the Earth something like 14,000 times the energy we use globally. That energy is distributed democratically onto every surface it touches (for free) yet we pay trillions of dollars to a handful of people controlling the One Tenth of One Percent of that same energy we get from fossil fuels. There is no good reason that our whole energy system cannot be a local ownership/distribution system. The only thing stopping this is financial strangle hold of the few over the masses. We let this happen. We even support it. The money we pay to power companies and internet providers and even food flows right out of our local economies and into the few who are in control.

      We must rethink every system we are part of by "Going Local" on every level. While doing this we will also be creating thousands of local new jobs and keep the profits within our communities strengthening both the economy and democracy.

    • 3 years ago
  • Evmonk
    • 0
      Evmonk  

    • Brilliant analogy, and hopefully one that gets people to pay attention and avert the impending "bandwidth cartel."

    • 3 years ago
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