Re: [E-impact] Carbon-Intelligent Global Routing in Path-Aware Networks

[Michael Welzl <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On “induced traffic”:


> On May 10, 2023, at 2:50 PM, Michael Richardson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 2. How much reduction in service will society tolerate? (Example:
>> yesterday while waiting for a bus during a heavy rainstorm, I noticed
>> that the electronic sign at the bus stop had no data and displayed "Low
>> battery", because it was solar powered. Will society accept such
>> trade-offs, especially less trivial ones?)
> 
> I think that this is really a very important point.
> 
> If the effect of the next-stop information being absent from the bus shelter,
> because of a rainstorm, is that Brian takes his car, then it's an overall loss!
> 
> In another part of the thread, an argument was made that the Internet
> infrastructure is on anyway, whether it's transmitting cat videos or not.
> That's an argument called: fallacy of composition.
> 
> In transportation economics, it's called "induced traffic"
> 
> If marginal costs of new uses are low (or zero, or even negative) then new
> uses come up, and then the infrastructure becomes congested, and more
> infrastructure is added.  When that happens to highways, it's a problem for
> everyone other than the road construction companies. (There is always a lobby)
> It's not clear to me that the same is true for Internet infrastructure.

No, it isn’t. The Internet is not generally congested:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9817041 <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9817041>
Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06642 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06642>


> But... there is also always a lobby that benefits.

That may be true, but let’s not use the “induced traffic” argument because that just doesn’t seem to map to the Internet’s reality.

Cheers,
Michael