Why Is This Important, Pt. 1

One of the big questions people are asking me about the Google Fiber project is, “Why do we need it?” This is often followed by a grudging acceptance that their current service is, “ok,” and concerns about cost. In the next two posts I’ll try to explain why commercial, “broadband Internet” in the United States is pretty darn poor.

But before we can talk about where we are and where we are going we need to understand where we’ve been. So this first post will be: A Brief History of the Internet.

The Internet was born from the Defense Department’s need to have a reliable way to maintain command, control and communications over its continental-sized nuclear weapons forces. It was found in the late 1970’s that Ma Bell’s (remember, THE Phone Company?) telecommunications infrastructure was not very robust. If Chicago, for example, was vaporized it would cut the nation in two communications-wise.

Thus was born the idea of breaking communications into little chunks, called packets. Each packet would be like taking a very long letter and cutting it up, putting parts of the letter in separate, numbered envelopes. The envelopes would then be put in the mail. All envelopes/packets would find their own way to the destination and be re-assembled in the proper order once received. Ideally, they would use the shortest, most efficient route. However, if some part of the network was a glowing hole in the ground (vis. Chicago) a network of routers of packets for a message originating in Washington, DC destined for the ballistic submarine pens in Washington State could find an alternative route, say through St. Louis or Dallas and eventually all the packets/envelopes would reach their destination.

This network was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and later the National Science Foundation and was used and further developed by the military and research institutions through the mid-1980’s. The usefulness of the networking protocols of DARPA-/NSF-net were soon picked up on and early commercial networks hooked into the Internet in the late 1980’s such as UUNET and Compuserve.

The 1970’s and 1980’s saw the creation of the fist protocols for delivering e-mail, transferring files and collective message boards. But until the early 1990’s the Internet was the pretty much the private domain of scientific researchers, the Defense Department and computer hobbyists.

In 1991 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the idea was developed of building documents that used structured sets of tags which would allow users to embed links in documents. This was because so much of their type of research depended upon hundreds and hundreds of supporting documents and data sets. Think: a footnote that would take you straight to the referenced resource. This sounds blindingly obvious to us today, but this was truly groundbreaking then.

This hyper linking technology would allow complex research ideas and papers to be linked together in a “web” of related information. Not long after the CERN developents, in 1993, a couple of graduate students at the University of Illinois developed a bit of software for “browsing” these kinds of documents, a web viewer called Mosaic. Thus were born web pages and the modern conception of the Internet.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, use of the Internet took off. Control (and responsibility) of the physical backbone of the Internet was given over to the seven regional bell operating companies and other private networks in 1992. From 1993 to the early 2000’s it was estimated that the use of the Internet grew by over 100 percent per year. By late 2009 it is estimated that there are 1.67 billion Internet users; roughly one in four human beings. From a few thousand to one quarter of the planet in about sixteen years. That’s how fast this has happened.

But at no time since the DoD gave up control has anyone ever “owned” the Internet. The wires are controlled by the indvidual, regional operators. But they are useless without the structure of the internet; the names, number and protocols it runs on.

The regulations for domains and addresses are governed by an International committee, the International Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The basic operating rules, or protocols that govern how packets are routed and how various programs should work are also governed by open international committees such as the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), which governs the network hardware side and the World Wide Web Consortium (WWWC), on the software side. All these rules are transparent and accessible by anyone.

During the period of explosive growth in the Dot-Com era right through to today the one thing that makes the Internet special is its blind simplicity. At the end of the day, all it is is a network of very fast little virtual mail-room clerks shifting packets to and from their destinations. The network does not care at all what is inside that packet. It can be part of a credit card transaction, a video, a love letter, a chat text, a blog post, literally anything that can be reduced to digital bits can be moved over the Internet.

The Internet’s strength and its value as a tremendous generator of innovation, progress and freedom in the world is directly linked to its OPENNESS. The fact that it is a dumb network that just moves packets means that anyone who can think of an interesting thing to do by moving little chunks of information, can go right ahead and do it, EVEN IF ITS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE. THEY DON’T NEED PERMISSION. IF IT FOLLOWS THE PROTOCOLS IT GETS ACCEPTED.

It is that incredible openness to innovation that has taken us in a mere sixteen years from the very first, text-only web pages on dial-up modems to our modern TV-on-the-computer, Revolution will be Tweeted live, interconnected-as-never-before world. The Internet has been quite simply the most important invention since the printed word.

What is crucial now is to maintain this physical and logical “web” and to continue to extend it so that new uses can be found in order to continue the human and economic development that the Internet has enabled.

Next Episode: Why Your Internet Sucks.