This is the third installment of the podcast, "The Social Networking in the Middle East."
ポッドキャスト、中東のソーシャルネットワーキングの第三弾です。
Steven Cherry: So I guess let’s just step back and tell us, you know, what is the experience of the Internet in the Middle East and Facebook in particular? I guess it’s different in Egypt versus Tunisia versus Qatar versus Libya versus wherever, so maybe you could just take us on a little tour of the Middle East Internet.
Ben Zhao: Because of where traditional servers are placed—you know, Twitter and Facebook and some of the other social networks—they’re mainly based in the U.S. And so most of their data centers, most of their servers that process actions from the users do reside in the U.S., and what that means is that many typical user actions—like posting a comment, or sending a “poke,” or adding an entry to a photo—most of these kinds of things do have to go through data centers in the U.S.
And that means multiple potential round trips between the local user, who might be in the Middle East or elsewhere and the data center in the U.S. So there are certain things—there’s a lot of things that people can do to speed up the process, but ultimately, signals do have to traverse an extremely long distance.
So if you are in Egypt, in the Middle East and contacting Facebook, there’s only so much you can do to optimize the experience—the signals do have to go, you know, back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean several times potentially before the user sees their actions take place. One of the other properties of the Middle East Internet is that it is much less redundant, much less complex, if you will, more sparse than Internet elsewhere.
So it is possible for things like censorship to happen by simply shutting down a small number of ISPs. Whereas I think that same type of action, if you were to try to enforce that in the U.S. or Canada or Europe, would be very difficult simply because of so many ISPs having a redundant path around the Internet. Shutting them down and doing a full partition would be much, much more difficult.
Steven Cherry: Yeah. So I guess in Egypt where the Internet was shut off for about four or five key days during the protests there, there were only really five big Internet service providers, and it wasn’t that hard for the government to basically order them all to shut down or ask them to voluntarily shut down. So you think with a lot more ISPs it would be a lot harder to do that. What would it take to bring about more ISPs there?
Ben mentions "traditional servers." This "traditional" does not mean the "outdated," but to differentiate hardware servers from the newer virtual servers.