The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 117 页

Another reason the open Internet may provide a diminished fraction of the load for next-generation Cloud services is that it is getting full. There is a finite amount of information that can be pumped through the network as it is currently constructed, and that limit may be appearing on the near horizon. In order to ensure that future services can stay online and continue to scale, Cloud platforms will likely continue to build their own secondary and tertiary versions on top of or in place of the “ old Internet, ” using both open and closed protocols to consolidate proprietary publics and networks. How full are the physical channels of the Cloud layer already? While it is extraordinarily difficult to exactly map the scope and shape of the Internet, as so many avenues are closed off from scrutiny, ²⁵ it is nevertheless generally agreed that the total amount of data produced and transmitted doubles every one or two years (perhaps faster). A recent study estimated that in 2018, 6.5 zettabytes of data (trillions of gigabytes) will pass through the Cloud, with 31% in the public Cloud and 69% in the private Cloud. ²⁶ The increase is seen as a function of faster processors in end user devices, which can produce more data and feed then into common platforms, but the growth rate of shared data is increasing faster than the spectral efficiency of the optical fiber networks over which it passes can accommodate it. Even techniques like multiplex polarization will probably not suffice in the long term. ²⁷ We may like to think of fiber optics as providing functionally limitless bandwidth, but at a zettabyte order of magnitude, for a planetary Cloud ultimately linking trillions of devices, this is not true. Unless new technologies, such as widespread multicore fiber, are widely deployed in the next decade, the physical limits of how much information can actually pass through a given channel may introduce new economies of bandwidth scarcity, prioritization, and pricing. ²⁸ At the same time, newer networks with greater carrying capacity, as well as faster signal throughput, may provide new kinds of Cloud services previously only imagined, such as holodeck-quality virtual environments. Such accomplishments may steer primate evolution toward shared intersubjective experience, introducing fantastic new genres of narrative, design, architecture, poetry, medicine, and music at a planetary scale, or it may allow a select few to watch 8K LOLcat videos from 10 angles at once.

Cloud Layer

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