Now that every keyboard jockey in America has had time to calm down, there's one question left to ask about the ability of the Internet to handle the crush of demand for the Starr Report.
Namely: Who cares?
The delivery of the independent counsel's referral to Congress was touted as the first or, at least, latest "mass moment" for the Net to prove itself in a national crisis.
It didn't - and it did.
At the peak of demand, in the afternoon of Sept. 11, attempts to access private-sector sites MSNBC and CNN failed 53 percent and 32 percent of the time, respectively, according to Keynote Systems. The Web site of the House of Representatives, which rushed to put out the report, failed to serve citizens 89 percent of the time.
But that was during the first hour of the report's release. Over the course of two days, the picture changed radically. The failure rate at the House of Representatives stayed fairly high, at 48 percent, but access through private sites was easy. The MSNBC failure rate went down to 4 percent. The failure rate at USA Today and The Wall Street Journal was only 1 percent.
The obvious lesson: If you can just cool your jets a little bit, the Internet works just fine. Nowhere in the Constitution is there an amendment that says, even in the era of instant information, every American is entitled to all information instantly and simultaneously.
Indeed, it would border on the irresponsible for the U.S. government to develop its information infrastructure based on peak demand for one hour of an event that comes around every 25 years, such as a special counsel's investigative report.
Sure, the potential impeachment of a president should be of great and grave public concern. But this is a public that, in the norm, does not show much inclination to involve itself in the common weal, at least online.
A case in point: Thomas, the Web site for information on legislation before Congress. On a typical day, the site records between 100,000 and 200,000 hits. On that fateful Friday, when the Starr Report was rushed into ubiquitous electronic existence, 4 million hits were recorded. The next three days: 2 million, 930,000 and 1.5 million.
What was driving interest in this report, after all, was not interest in how the government works and would address the questions of perjury and obstruction of justice. If the populace was so interested in how the gears grind, then it would long ago have demanded to be able to quickly and easily see how its elected senators and representatives vote on the bills before them. As things now stand at Thomas, that is not easily done.
Can you simply type in a congressperson's name and see his or her entire voting record since coming into office? Can you go one year back? One month? No. You can't do it that way at all.
By digging several levels down, it is possible to see which legislators voted "yea" and which voted "nay" on one particular bill. But if you want to see how the person voted on another bill, you go back to the top and dig down again. It's mind- and finger-numbing. It certainly demonstrates that it is hardly the intent of this or any Congress that has preceded it to make key information on important events instantly available to anyone who wants to know about it.
If that were the case, Thomas would be showing votes by congresspeople the second they are cast, and those new votes would immediately be linked to a complete voting record of each legislator.
So, to ask, say, Herbert S. Becker, the director of information technology services at the Library of Congress, to design Thomas so it can handle a freak peak like this is absurd. Yes, he and his staff can probably do a better job in the future, by upgrading the communications links, adding computers with more horsepower and using software that would spread demand across all of its available servers.
But you have to ask yourself, as Becker does from a purely technical standpoint, "What is the value of all this information?"
If this were a report wholly centered on the Whitewater real-estate shenanigans, as Starr, if memory recalls right, was first charged to investigate, there would have been no stress on the Internet to begin with. The American public would have yawned. Instant books and Saturday morning papers would have sated all demand.
This was hardly the first test of the Internet's ability to deliver an important legislative document. Rather, it was merely the latest experiment in the Net's ability to satisfy Americans' seemingly boundless appetite for free porn.
