Directions: Read the following text. Choose
the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on the
ANSWER SHEET. For most of the past
25 years, no single person or company has been powerful enough to control how
the American Internet works. One 1 for
that was the diffuse and chaotic nature of its online economy—a kind of
2 Wild West where thousands of
producers 3 the attention of the
masses. In this environment, no single company, not 4
giants like Google 5 Facebook, 6 enough traffic to bend
the network’s free-market checks and balances. The
infrastructure of the Internet helped 7 everyone on a level playing field as well. All players, from individuals to
8 companies, had to pay an Internet
service provider (ISP) a flat 9 , based
on the speed or volume of the service, for online 10
. In 11 for those fees,
the ISPs would expand and maintain their pipes and pass their customer’s traffic
to and from another set of companies that owned the larger, global transit ways
for online 12 . It was, for a time, a
marvelous architecture, fundamentally unlike any of the other networks in
American lives. There was no government ownership 13
with the interstate highway system, no
14 long-distance plans as with phone networks and no
individual postage required to send content as with the U.S. Postal
Service. But in recent years, that unique
15 has started to crack, and the reason is the size of the
biggest players. A decade ago, thousands of companies
16 in the daily buzz of Internet traffic, said Craig
Labovitz, the CEO of DeepField, a network-research firm. By 2009, 150 companies
17 half of all that traffic, and by
early this year, just 30 companies 18 the 19 of the daily give-and-take.
As of March, just two companies in particular—Netflix and Google, which owns
YouTube—accounted for 47% of all Internet traffic during prime-time hours at
night, 20 Sandvine, a network-equipment
company.