WASHINGTON, 25 March 2003 — The US-led invasion of Iraq — called the “first war of the Internet age’’ — is showing how much the communications medium has adapted in its relatively recent life.
Major news sites on the web have handled from 30 to 100 percent more traffic this week, compared to last, with scant disruption, partly because they bulked up their computer servers in recent years. They also learned tricks for peak times such as removing graphics and pictures which take added minutes for computers to digest.
The Internet’s global reach has vastly eased communications, from soldiers writing home to war protesters organizing demonstrations. And the increased popularity of personal web logs — nicknamed “blogs’’ — has led battlefield corespondents and others to produce their own running diaries of the war in real time for all the world to see. “I think this is a watershed event in terms of depth of information,’’ said Steven Jones, an Internet researcher and communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Whether the Internet makes a difference in the way that television did in Vietnam, I don’t think we can answer that at this point, but it’s going to make a difference in more personal ways.’’
While technology historians say the Internet would be hard-pressed to match the feat of television in the 1960s, credited with shifting public sentiment and ultimately ending US involvement in Vietnam, the informal, untamed aspect of cyberspace is delivering this conflict to the public in ways much different from the past, including the spoon-fed broadcasts of the first Gulf War 12 years ago. Top news websites such as CNN.com and MSNBC.com each had roughly one million more users a day since the war began than they had a week earlier, said Keynote Systems, a Silicon Valley company that measures Internet performance.
Keynote said in spite of the increased traffic, it hadn’t detected the system disruptions it noted during the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Among the web properties that have struggled to process increased demand were those belonging to the US Army and Marine Corps, a protest site called antiwar.com and Al-Jazeera.net, belonging to the satellite television station in Qatar, Keynote reported.
Because the US invasion had been long anticipated and has escalated gradually since it began late Wednesday, it hasn’t caused a singular jam as occurred on Sept. 11, 1998 when millions of users simultaneously attempted to download the 445-page report by Special Prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr about Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton. Greg Bloom, an Internet analyst with Nielsen/Net Ratings, said one change helping unclog the Internet was that “streaming video’’ services that were once widely available for free became paid “premium’’ services after 2001 because of the news demand produced by the terrorist attack, but also because the technology investment bust gave providers less incentive to give away Internet services. RealNetworks, a major provider of streaming video and audio for CNN and ABC News among various sites, could benefit from increased demands of the Iraq war, he speculated.
David Card, an analyst with Jupiter Research in New York, said the war presents an opportunity for Internet news and service providers to prove their worth to an enlarged audience. Like the television in-roads made by CNN after Operation Desert Storm, the trick will be keeping users afterward, he said.
On the downside, Internet news sites are hampered by the same advertising challenges that other media confront: Advertisers aren’t anxious to spend money if consumers are too anxious and distracted to buy their products. Also, Internet pop-ups ads can often seem whimsical or intrusive — not the most appropriate tone during a time of war.
