<videovortex> How streaming video changed the shape of the internet — Quartz

[Andreas Treske]

> http://qz.com/742474/how-streaming-video-changed-the-shape-of-the-internet/ <http://qz.com/742474/how-streaming-video-changed-the-shape-of-the-internet/>


"As video grows in importance, text, for so long the de facto means of internet communication, will shrink in significance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has already said as much, proclaiming that the future of his social network lies with video, and increasingly more immersive forms, such as virtual reality. Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus Rift to push that process along. Facebook executives talk about the end of the written word as part of the business plan.
Facebook and Google continue to tread dangerously close to the line where they will start controlling the last-mile of internet access for their users. Facebook has several irons in the fire, including Free Basics, which gives 25 million users free or subsidized access to the internet but also restricts those users to a narrow range of accessible content. It is also working on Aquila, its plan to beam wireless internet access to people using a giant airborne drone, and it’s laying a transatlantic cablewith Microsoft.
Google has its consumer ISP division, Google Fiber, which provides over 450,000 internet connections in nine cities. Like Facebook, it has a quixotic wireless internet access project, this one called Project Loon, which substitutes Facebook’s drone for a hot-air balloon. The goal is the same, to be the final link between a user and the online world.
As Big Tech gobbles up more infrastructure and accounts for more internet traffic, it poses questions for the future of the network’s openness, says Farrell, the former ICANN executive. “It means the internet is evolving from being a peer-to-peer open standards network to being a proprietary set of, effectively, VPNs [virtual private networks],” she says. “Which users are not quite aware of—they think they’re on the open internet and they’re not.”
You can imagine a future where content bandwidth demands are so great that only ISPs hooked up to content owners’ private networks can deliver the seamless experience users expect. That means if a major ISP isn’t in your town or part of the world, you might not have the benefit of that connection. That means you’re going to be left waiting as Facebook Live, or an equivalent VR stream, buffers. “It has huge implications for how the internet can grow. There are nearly 4 billion people who are not connected to the internet,” says Sastry. “How do we make it economically viable for them to connect to the internet, and have the same experiences as we have here?”
For now, internet users, infrastructure providers, and the increasingly vertically integrated tech companies are happy to keep the video streams flowing."

Andreas Treske
treske at bilkent.edu.tr



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