To Visit the Internet You Must Leave the Internet: An Interview with "Tubes" Author Andrew Blum

It's tempting to think that Andrew Blum chose Tubes as the title for his book for pure fun, because, really, how absurd was it that Senator Ted Stevens once used this word to explain the Internet? But Blum’s title is more interesting, and it points directly at the descriptive challenge he’s set for himself and for us. To appreciate a giant place where we live but which most of us know little about, we have to put aside what we think we know. Tubes is a winking acknowledgement that the Internet is of course not a series of tubes. But it’s also an admission that, by god, it really is a series of tubes.

Former Senator Stevens was in the midst of a Congressional debate over Internet regulation and net neutrality when he deployed the metaphor in 2006:

the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

For all of the fuddy-duddyness of the remark – it hinted at the lack of understanding among people in power about how the Internet works – it also hit on the under-acknowledged physicality of this giant network of networks. Exploring this place by visiting nodes and pipes and data centers around the world, Blum is more focused on the descriptive, not the proscriptive. But his tour of the webs that make the web — and the meticulous technical and political linking process formally known as “internetworking” — is a valuable picture of a place that we’re on all the time but, as is now obvious, we don’t really know.

The tubes metaphor has a witty familiarity, but it also works nicely to illustrate just how fraught this Internet is on a linguistic, philosophical and political level. Stevens was right: this Internet is a series of tubes, tubes that are controlled and linked and served and strung along the bottom of the ocean, in some cases in the same trenches that once carried telegraph cables to distant shores. (The senator isn't around to see his metaphor vindicated: he died in a plane crash in 2009, while flying on a jet that belonged to the Alaskan telecom company.)

In that sense, the Internet is also about people, in real life, who design, regulate and use the Internet. And the guys who keep it running. “These guys aren’t Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg,” Blum writes. “They didn’t invent anything, reshape any industries, or make a whole lot of money. They worked inside the global network and made it work. But they lived locally, as most of us do.” Living locally, being aware of one’s place, even within a city so large it can be hard to see, being able to describe that place, Blum’s book underscores, will only make that place look less like the product of obscure interests and more like the kind of place where we’d like to spend our time.

When you're out there, meeting people, what kind of questions are you getting about Tubes, and what has surprised you?

I'm constantly surprised by how much people want to understand what the Internet does, particularly, the most striking response is always, "I had no idea how it worked and now I have a little bit of a clue", but that response is always geared toward a little bit older audience. Yesterday in Boston was a much older audience, or at least the people who came up to talk to me after. But without avail, people are worried about security; I'm asked the security question every single time. Which is particularly funny. You know, one of the excerpts is titled, "The Bullseye of America's Internet", and Equinix, the company it's about, was Tweeting all week that they are the bullseye of America's Internet. Any conflict they once had about where they were, they seem very comfortable with putting this big bullseye around their building.

So what does that tell you maybe about the threat, and peoples' concern?

We are so ingrained with the notion that these places have to be secret and there's almost no truth to that, and there's definitely no rationale to it. We're so trained to be “oh, there's this critical infrastructure that people talk about” in hushed tones, rather than a really valid point, which is that a greater threat to the future of the Internet is passing foolish legislation that doesn't take into account how the Internet actually works – not by terrorists blowing it up.

There must be some degree to which people are still getting accustomed to the idea of a physical Internet to begin with, right?

Yeah, I spoke to a young woman, a graduate student, the other night. The point that she made is, do I do small i or big I Internet? She does small i, I do big I. She wondered if maybe we needed to reconsider the metaphor I'm talking about, because it does bring an element and that element has political and cultural implications. That's the idea that excited me the most, that we can reconsider the metaphor.

Have you been thinking about the "tubes" metaphor much since the book was finished?

I've been thinking a lot about the metaphor because I've also been thinking about how I've not deliberately become a champion for Ted Stevens. There was a great blog post in the Alaska newspaper that quoted me defending Ted Stevens, which I'm happy to do, it is such a useful metaphor.

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You do a very great job of describing the structure and the social order behind the internet, but it's still very complicated and we always have to resort to metaphor and other forms of simplification for describing these things.

That's what I've learned – to stress the caveat, that I'm not going to explain how the Internet works.

Right. You've become a defender of Ted Stevens, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and the expert on how the Internet works?

Right, which has taught me to quickly bound my explanation of how the internet works, which is by saying, this is how it works in physical space, not in total. There is a whole conversation to be had about how it works in total, DNS and all of those things, but there is another conversation to be had about what it looks like, and how it fits together.

Do you see that conversation emerging right now?

Yeah, utterly. I'm the center of the storm. But the range — it can appeal to conservative talk radio, where the implication is that Washington doesn't know what it's talking about, should get out of our way, and that resonates with the message that we don't know about our troops but we should. And then Mother Jones also wrote about it, for the same reasons. I'm not the first to say it, but the politics of online regulation is that the left and the right circle back to this libertarian place.

Do you get a sense that people in Washington are listening, and there is maybe a more cyber-conscious group of people in power now?

I'm sorry to say I don't. There's been no social media response from the traditional keepers of this conversation. In places like the New America Foundation, the Berkman Center, even the publications that predominately cover things like net neutrality, publications like GigaOm… the Internet infrastructure industry, they’ve responded very strongly. The social media world has responded strongly because it explains a part of the Internet that they don’t deal with. As of yet, the Internet policy world has been utterly silent.

One of the things that surprised me again and again in researching the book was what I was hearing from network engineers and what I was reading was in the telecom policy realm. For example, the Berkman Institute 2009 Broadband report, which was the major thought document going into the broadband stimulus funding in 2009, does not include the word "peering" and only mentions the phrase middle mile once in the context of the European countries that have good Internet. And so that was three years ago. The way that networks connect to each other has not been relevant or part of the conversation in the Internet policy world.

And why, would you argue, it really needs to be? What's the most direct explanation for why it needs to be in there?

That's a good question. If it's not there, then you are limiting the conversation about regulation and access to the last mile service providers. You're not looking at any of the upstream causes or effects. One of the main flash points, for example, with net neutrality, is Netflix and Comcast. Comcast is saying that Netflix counts toward your bandwidth cap, but Comcast media services doesn't. And that's a violation of lots of principles, but if you put it in the context of not just the last mile pipes, but also the connection to the rest of the Internet, the logic becomes a lot clearer. And similarly, if you recognize that everybody pays for the Internet somehow, that bandwidth has a true cost. Then you end up quickly ostensibly defending ISPs, "oh, they should be compensated in some form." But by ignoring it, you don't even give consumers a way to consider options.

So what would the options be in that case?

At the moment, the only choices you have are bandwidth, which is promised but not always delivered. How fast is your connection. And there's no transparency about what bandwidth you're getting from your provider. And caps – total monthly usage. And those are sort of blunt instruments. We're used to other realms, whether taxis or cell phones or air travel or anything like that, with usage costs depending on demand.

Do you see the Internet moving in the direction of pay-per-use?

I do think we're going to begin to see a bit more of a menu of options. We're going to begin to see a premium Skype $5 add-on, or a Netflix-isn’t-included-in-my-cap sort of thing.

Just thinking about what kinds of costs might end up on our Internet bills, it's tempting to think of the development of the highway system and the railroad system and the telephone system. Is that a productive comparison? Do we have a roadmap at all for how to move forward here, or are we going to have to write a lot of that roadmap from scratch?

There is no roadmap. The conversation at the moment, again, is based on these very blunt metrics. And even the endless refrain that the US is behind on boadband is based on nationwide statistics that don't begin to reflect the regularity, where it's good and where it's bad, how much it costs.

The chart you see ad nauseam is the broadband price per speed internationally. It doesn't reflect what I pay at home or what my speed at home is, nor does it reflect what other people pay, for better or worse. But one caveat: the book is descriptive; the prescriptive implications I’m just beginning to have conversations about.

Can you describe the stakeholders that are involved in the internet? I love the moments where people are coming together in real life, such as the peering conference. I wonder if you can talk about how these groups all fit together, how they interact, and who they are. The people who are operating the pipes, the people who are operating the data centers and the various nodes.

The first thing to remember is that there is no public Internet. The Internet is an entirely private network. I mean, there are academic networks, but even those run upon the private backbones. That's key, that the “public” Internet is a bit of a misnomer.

The government’s involvement in the Internet died in the ’80s, right?

The military's never turned off its network, but everything we do online goes through private pipes.

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So who controls the pipes?

Well let's see. The first group are the ISPs, the people we pay to deliver the Internet. But that you can subdivide into commercial ISPs, which are a different breed. The second group is the big content providers, most of whom run their own global networks…

Like the Facebooks and the Googles.

The Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons, CBS Interactive, and so on. That’s two. The third group are the big carriers, which are the big international backbones [Tata Indicom, Level 3 and others]. So both the ISPs and the content providers are the carriers’ customers. And the other group are the contact delivery networks, who provide an absolutely crucial service to the content networks and the ISPs, which is essentially to provide a fast lane. Hulu looks so good because Hulu is cached at your local cable node.

The Internet in many ways began in the public domain. Now that it’s private and much bigger, it looks chaotic. It’s governed by a patchwork of agreements between these various entities, by obscure private contracts between websites and users, shot through with privacy-invading cookies, and becomes the subject of giant political battles. Should we think about the internet in some cases as a public utility, even if it isn't?

My best hope is in some ways related to the evolution of food in the last ten years, which has entirely been driven by consumer choice. It's not as if there's any regulation that has encouraged more organic or local or sustainable agriculture practices. But the boom in that has been based entirely on consumer choice, and the market serves that preference dramatically. At root, it begins with a basic conversation about where our food comes from.

When you started pitching this book around, what kind of reaction did you get?

I think immediately people wondered, as I had wondered, why no one else had done it before. I think the thing is that in order to do it, you need to be someone who writes about the physical world. You can't just be a technology writer. It's closer to art criticism than technology in that it's all about finding meaning in what you're seeing.

What prepared you to launch into this travelogue as a writer. Did you draw inspiration from other writers or other kinds of writing?

The most important thing for me was to focus on primary sources, but even more specifically on people and places. I work with fact-checkers and magazines a lot, and I knew that because there wasn't a lot written about these places that I'd need to get my information from a primary source, things that I saw and things that I heard.

Right, you couldn’t just Google it! There’s this imaginative element to it too, a function of having to describe this hulking, massive amorphous thing, a kind of writing in new terrain. Obviously there are allegiances and nods to sci-fi, but it's also architectural, in that this is an architecture we live with. In some ways, the Internet isn’t just physical, but it effects the every day physical spaces that we happen to live in too, in more than physical ways. Is that something that's piqued your interest: the other architectural implications of the internet?

It was certainly one of the key things that drove me into this. One of the days I really wanted to do this was I was spending all my days in front of a screen, and at the end of the day I was looking at this screen from my pocket. My sense of place and of the physical world had dramatically changed really fast, especially with the arrival of the iPhone. Suddenly, suddenly, suddenly not only was I spending some of my time online, but I was also online all the time. I was out in the streets, and everyone was engaged in their screens at the same time. In our old apartment that we lived in from 2005 to 2011, we overlooked the entrance to the train. We could hear voices of people at the top of the stairs. And in that five year period, what people did at the top of the stairs changed. It was that dramatic a change in the way we engage with open space.

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How has the whole process in the past few years affect you, in the way you use the Internet, and in other ways?

The dramatic change was, as a writer, where I realized I was spending all my time with the screen. The days that I was visiting the Internet, I was off the Internet. And that was really dramatic. The days that I was off reporting and talking to people and seeing these places, I put my phone in my bag and I didn't look at it all day. And that's an incredibly unusual way of being in the world. This is going to sound pathetic when you say it out loud, but it's a reminder of how interesting the world is.

Do you plan to go back and visit any of these places?

We're just at the beginning of a wave of super data centers. Facebook and Google are building them now, because of the demands that are being put on internet-based or cloud services. The Icelands and Swedens and Oregons and Canadas. There is going to be a landscape of super data centers. The sheer fact that Apple is building across the street from Facebook in Prineville [Oregon] is remarkable. Prineville is 35 miles from Bend, which is the nearest thing resembling a city, and 180 miles from Portland. And they're not just in the same state as Facebook and Google: they're on the same street. The location decision is a blank slate. They can start by thinking about putting these data centers anywhere in the world, but instead they make the exact same choice.

I think about the amount of real estate and energy that will be used to power these things- do you have any idea of what the next generation of the internet will look like and what it will mean and what sort of impact it will have on the physical earth? Or is that something that is too speculative right now?

The trend could mean a more substantial physical change. One of the things that was striking about the super data centers, was that if I pictured it initially as an industrial blight on the landscape, when you get there it's the opposite. It's replacing an industry that was lost in a community that desperately needs industry. The Google data center is across the street from an abandoned aluminum smelter and it essentially uses all the power that the aluminum melter used to, almost one for one.

Can you quickly describe ICANN, and what kind of influence it has in terms of network addressing? I know there's been some concerns and some adversity and some questions about the conflict of interests from within the organization, and there was talk of the United Nations taking over…. Can you talk about ICANN in terms of its role in all of this?

Honestly, no. It's a world in itself. It's such an overlay, it's the last layer on top of these other physical issues. Have you looked at the OSI model diagram? The Internet’s stack of protocols, layered 0-7 — zero is dirt, and one is glass and copper, and two is light, three is TCP/IP, and 4,5,6,7 is the internet we use. I used to tell engineers, I was operating maybe at level three, but mostly at two or up to two and a half.

Recently we’ve seen new gTLD domain strings come online, and the debut of new IP addresses under the IPV6 protocol. It’s giving us a lot more IP addresses for all the things that are presumably going to be on the internet in the future. The engineers don’t bring this stuff up a whole lot, do they?

No, the networks don't think about it that much except they're always trying to keep up with the increasing demands for bandwidth. It illustrates what’s so striking about the network operator community. They're not visionaries or bureaucrats or politicians. They're plumbers. They keep things going.

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How do you use the Internet these days?

Essentially all of my reading is now filtered through Twitter. If I do look at my RSS feeds, which I rarely do anymore, I’ve already caught everything interesting is on Twitter. I do it constantly. I do it through my phone, I do it through my laptop.

How do you manage to keep up with everything?

I'm always weeding out people I follow, but it allows me to be plugged in about technology, books, architecture, media, Brooklyn — and airplanes and weather [laughs]. Those are the key topics.

Do you have any other favorite tools that you use on the internet for getting work done? Google Docs?

I don't use Google Docs or webmail, I don't use Gmail. I never do any writing in the browser, I swear by Scrivener for the longer form stuff. I've abandoned Microsoft Word mostly for Text Edit. I wrote the book using Scrivener. There are a lot of things I like about Scrivener, but one of the most basic is, there isn't a split second delay when you press a key, and when you go back to Microsoft Word after using Scrivener it seems like there's a delay. Also, I got spoiled in the research for the book, using Devonthink, a relational database, and having a lot of smaller notes files. I haven’t kept using Devonthink for a bunch of reasons, but a rich text document, it’s just 2 or 3 k, where a word document is 60 or 70 k. And for notes that’s just crazy.

Why don't you use Gmail?

As an independent journalist, I don't like the idea of having my most important documents via free service, where the terms of it aren't entirely clear. So it seems relatively straight forward to pay $40 a year for really good email from somebody called Fastmail. I really don't like the idea of all of my correspondences linked up to my web searches.

And, of course, you were corresponding with Google while writing the book.

Well, that too. It does surprise me that lots of people who take their tech life very seriously and their tools very seriously as a matter of course use Gmail.

Absolutely. I definitely use Gmail every minute of my working day, but I think you point to one of the issues that the book is about, which is that we take for granted where these things on the web come from and that we don't know much about them.

Yeah, and I use Gmail enough to know that it's pretty amazing, but as a writer, to store all my ideas – this isn’t my social correspondence – in a place without a clear exchange, without knowing clearly what I'm giving Google in exchange for what they're giving me, I'm pretty uncomfortable with it.

Is there a data center that you're really curious to get inside that you didn't manage to?

Google. But then again, there are governors and senators that haven't been inside either.

Maybe for the sequel.

Right!

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