What is it about obituaries that so attracts some people? Perhaps it’s Schadenfreude, or maybe it’s a form of whistling past the graveyard, but some folks can’t wait to bring you the gleeful news that such-and-so is mortally ill — so keen, in fact, that as with Mark Twain, né Clemens[1. “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” This is the actual quote, as you can see from the image of the actual letter [1] that Twain sent from London.], they wind up being previous.
So we have two imminent deaths reported recently that may be just a bit exaggerated. The first is the death of the internet. In 2007 Nemertes Research published a report [2]that claimed internet usage would outstrip internet capacity by 2012 and the whole would come crashing down. Poo-pooing was widespread, but Johna Till Johnson, Nemertes’ president, refreshed her doomsday prediction only this spring. In “The Internet sky really is falling [3]” she reminds us that it’s not simply lack of capacity that is the fatal flaw, but also a shortage of IP addresses and a failure to have an agreed-upon, effective replacement internet architecture available. Now the Cassandra has added net neutrality to the list of evils that will kill the internet. “Hello net neutrality, goodbye Internet [4]” argues that an inability of the service providers to charge differentially for various content types will mean that general costs will go up and that will kill free “peering”: “When peering goes away, so does the Internet — because you’re no longer able to connect to anywhere from anywhere.”
An Ars Technica [5]piece lays all this out and answers her recent arguments — principally by showing that internet use is not in fact growing exponentially as predicted. As it points out, in Canada the growth of internet traffic has slowed from a 53 percent increase in 2005-2006 to 44 percent in the following year to 32 percent in 2007-2008. They remain, all in all, quite boosterish about the continued existence of the internet.
Then there’s email.
The Wall Street Journal doesn’t exactly predict its death, but rather the end of its reign as the king of communication. “Why Email No Longer Rules…
And what that means for the way we communicate” Faster and more fun are what we want now, apparently. Which means that Twitter and Facebook are growing at great rates. Which means that we now need filtering. Which means… the future is not clear.
There’s no mention of Google’s Wave. And much of what gets retailed is old hat — certainly for Slaw readers. Besides, old hats are often favourites. So I’m not ready to bet that lawyers are about to move away from their beloved email in any numbers just yet, the WSJ notwithstanding.