Boztopia.com

I spent a few hours offline today thanks to a problem with the network my Internet service provider (Covad) uses to shunt its traffic across the Interwebs. Thanks to my Wi-Fi-enabled laptop and my mobile phone, I was able to keep track of the day’s developments, but it could have been a major productivity hit for my job if not handled carefully (and if my boss hadn’t been there).

Things like that are a good reminder of just how fragile this massive enterprise we call the “Internet” really is. See, believe it or not, Ted Stevens was right when he said it was a “series of tubes,” in that getting data from one end to the other involves going through a LOT of different pathways–and if one of those gets screwed up, or one of the providers gets their nose out of joint, a lot of people lose access to their communications as a result.

Just in the last three years, there have been two big spats between providers of fiber-optic networks and the businesses that pay them to handle data traffic, and the result each time has been widespread loss of Internet access for individuals, businesses, and governments alike. First there was a squabble between fiber-optic providers Level 3 and Cogent over pricing issues:

The details of the dispute aren’t known, except that Level 3 has contended that it is carrying more traffic for Cogent customers than Cogent is carrying for Level 3 customers. Backbone providers traditionally hand off traffic to each other at no charge, a practice called “peering.” Both companies own fiber-optic networks that link phone companies, cable companies, and the independent Internet service providers who serve the public. Cogent links 360 Internet service providers around the world. Level 3 serves the 10 largest U.S. Web providers. Industry insiders say that Level 3’s real motivation may have more to do with Cogent’s pricing. It has for years undercut other backbone carriers and has been signing new customers at a rapid clip, angering other carriers.

At the time, I missed three days’ worth of mail, which all got belched up to my various accounts in a jumble that I had to sort through, and I got off easy compared to most. Businesses that rely on agreements between these two companies–or on businesses that pay these companies–lost out on considerably more.

The second fight happened just two months ago, this time between Cogent and Sprint:

Sprint, a major wholesaler, had set up a peering agreement in 2006 with Cogent, a smaller wholesale provider. The two would exchange traffic between their respective networks for free, provided certain traffic conditions were met. Sprint decided that the conditions weren’t met, and started billing Cogent for the connection; Cogent refused to pay. Sprint eventually decided the ever-growing unpaid bill was unacceptable, and pulled the plug on the interconnects. The end result was that anyone on a Sprint network (regardless of whether they paid Sprint directly or through a retail partner) lost access to any site that was hosted on Cogent’s network, and vice versa. Not only did various entities find themselves unable to reach various partners, but anyone using a Sprint device to access the Internet couldn’t reach any servers on Cogent at all. The sharp outcry caused Sprint to quickly reverse this decision.

You can learn more about the story from Karl Bode and Om Malik. But that’s the thing–if you weren’t a techie, a reader of Forbes, or knowledgeable about how this happened, you might never have known about it. And your instinct would have been to blame the content provider you see on your screen–”Aw, man, I’m not getting my emails! Yahoo sucks!” “What? Gmail’s down again?” Et cetera, et cetera.

Because these agreements are kept so much on the down low, and are entirely predicated on the ability of fickle corporations to get along, there’s every possibility this could happen again. The irony, of course, is that no one gets on the Internet because they have a particular love for Verizon, Sprint, Level 3, etc.–the content is the destination, and the networks are just the means of transportation. Think of it like the subway–you ride the subway to get where you want to go, not because you find it particularly enjoyable. (You might, of course, but that’s not your preeminent aim.)

Yet these same networks can shut off access to your desired content destination the moment they get into a fight over pricing. It’s the same mentality that initially awakened the net neutrality debate–former AT&T chairman Ed Whitacre famously said he was tired of companies like Google making money off his “pipes,” and wanted to charge them more for the privilege of using his network.

And it’s that same mentality that requires we not only support Obama’s initiative for expanded broadband infrastructure, but that said infrastructure be treated as a public good, a utility for the use of the commons–and not a private service that can be turned on and off because Dan Hesse (Sprint CEO) has a bee in his bonnett for whatever reason.

Speaking of Hesse, it’s doubly ironic–he publicly expressed his fear of a more heavily regulated Internet if Obama was elected, but it was the bad decisions between his company and Cogent that led to me losing Internet access on my old cellphone for several weeks–which, in turn, gave me the impetus I needed to switch carriers to T-Mobile. Not that they’re much better than the others, but if Sprint had paid more attention to the needs of its customers, and less to playing cat-and-mouse with a business partner, they’d have one more customer. Now they have one less, and there’ll be more of those to follow, I am sure.