Remember the “Exaflood”? the idea that if you don’t give carriers whatever they’d like (less regulation, no net neutrality laws, no price controls, huge subsidies and tax credits, less consumer protection, metered billing) the Internet will grind to a halt and we’ll all be crying over our clogged tubes? The concept has been debunked countless times by real network traffic analysis that suggests Internet growth is not only reasonable, it’s easily managed by smart network engineers and just modest network investment.

The exaflood simply never arrived — because it isn’t real.

The term was first coined by Bret Swanson in a 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial, when Swanson was employed by The Discovery Institute (who in turn was employed by major carriers). With the Exaflood debunked as a concept not even remotely close to a scientific term, it was apparently time for Swanson (now offering his “services” directly to carriers) to craft some new scare-mongering nonsense. Ars Technica directs our attention to the fact that Swanson has apparently decided to rename the Exaflood for the cloud computing age. Says Swanson in an FCC filing (pdf):

Of course this “new paradigm” is no different from the old one — Swanson simply put a new coat of paint on his old claim that the bandwidth apocalypse is coming. Nothing in Swanson’s “new” argument magically eliminates the fact that bandwidth growth remains reasonable and manageable — whether it’s being generated by cloud computing or magic unicorns. Swanson even goes so far as to use the very MINTs data traditionally used to debunk his previous claims — as the cornerstone for his new ones.
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Tags: 2007 Wall Street, ars technica, Bret Swanson, cloud, coat of paint, computing, concept, discovery institute, Exaflood, fact, game boxes, growth, Internet, net neutrality, network, network traffic analysis, neutrality laws, new coat of paint, new paradigm, term, traffic, wall street journal editorial

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