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Happy Birthday Internet- Net turns 40 on Sep 2.
Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA would have never thought of wacky videos when they began testing 40 years ago on what was to become ‘the Internet’. Well, social networking was something alien, and for that matter; the various easy-to-use applications which drawn over a billion people online, were not even imagined.
What the researchers had set out to create was an open network for exchanging information freely. This outset had led to the innovation that today has resulted in the likes of YouTube, Facebook, twitter and the World Wide Web.
There's still plenty of room for innovation today, yet the openness fostering it may be eroding. While the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth.
Internet in a mid-life crisis
A number of factors are at blame for the present condition of the internet. Network operators are forced to erect security firewalls due to spam and hacking attacks.
Authoritarian regimes block access to many sites and services within their borders. And commercial considerations spur policies that can thwart rivals, particularly on mobile devices like the iPhone.
"There is more freedom for the typical Internet user to play, to communicate, to shop — more opportunities than ever before," said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "On the worrisome side, there are some lnger-term trends that are making it much more possible (for information) to be controlled."
Back on Sept. 2, 1969, about 20 people gathered in Kleinrock's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, to watch two bulky computers passing meaningless test data through a 15-foot gray cable, unknown to a number of people. That marked the beginning of the fledgling Arpanet network. Stanford Research Institute joined a month later, and UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah did by year's end.
The 1970s saw the birth of e-mail and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which allowed multiple networks to connect — and formed the Internet. The '80s gave birth to an addressing system with suffixes like ".com" and ".org" which are in widespread use today.
It was only in the '90s that the internet became a household name, though, after a British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the Web, a subset of the Internet that makes it easier to link resources across disparate locations. Meanwhile, service providers like America Online connected millions of people for the first time.
That early obscurity helped the Internet blossom, free from regulatory and commercial constraints that might discourage or even prohibit experimentation.
"For most of the Internet's history, no one had heard of it," Zittrain said. "That gave it time to prove itself functionally and to take root."
Even the US government, which funded much of the Internet's early development as a military project, left it alone after a while, allowing its engineers to promote their ideal of an open network.
When Berners-Lee, working at a European physics lab, invented the Web in 1990, he could release it to the world without having to seek permission or contend with security firewalls that today treat unknown types of Internet traffic as suspect.
Even the free flow of pornography led to innovations in Internet credit card payments, online video and other technologies used in the mainstream today.
"Allow that open access, and a thousand flowers bloom," said Kleinrock, a UCLA professor since 1963. "One thing about the Internet you can predict is you will be surprised by applications you did not expect."
On desktop computers, some Internet access providers have erected barriers to curb bandwidth-gobbling file-sharing services used by their subscribers.
The episode galvanized calls for the government to require ‘net neutrality’, which essentially means that a service provider could not favor certain forms of data traffic over others. But that wouldn't be a new rule as much as a return to the principles that drove the network Kleinrock and his colleagues began building 40 years ago.
Even if service providers don't actively interfere with traffic, they can discourage consumers' unfettered use of the Internet with caps on monthly data usage. Some access providers are testing drastically lower limits that could mean extra charges for watching just a few DVD-quality movies online.
While Apple insists its reviews are necessary to protect children and consumer privacy and to avoid degrading phone performance, other phone developers are trying to preserve the type of openness found on desktop computers. Google's Android system, for instance, allows anyone to write and distribute software without permission.
Yet even on the desktop, other barriers get in the way.
Steve Crocker, an Internet pioneer who now heads the startup Shinkuro Inc., said his company has had a tough time building technology that helps people in different companies collaborate because of security firewalls that are ubiquitous on the
Internet. Simply put, firewalls are designed to block incoming connections, making direct interactions between users challenging, if not impossible.
Removal of all barriers is not an option, of course. Security firewalls and spam filters became crucial as the Internet grew and attracted malicious behavior, much as traffic lights eventually had to be erected as cars flooded the roads. Removing those barriers could create larger problems.
What the Internet's leading engineers are trying to avoid are barriers that are so burdensome that they squash emerging ideas before they can take hold.
Already, there is evidence of controls at workplaces and service providers slowing the uptake of file-sharing and collaboration tools. Video could be next if consumers shun higher-quality and longer clips for fear of incurring extra bandwidth fees. Likewise, startups may never get a chance to reach users if mobile gatekeepers won't allow them.
If such barriers keep innovations from the hands of consumers, we may never know what else we may be missing along the way.
What the researchers had set out to create was an open network for exchanging information freely. This outset had led to the innovation that today has resulted in the likes of YouTube, Facebook, twitter and the World Wide Web.
There's still plenty of room for innovation today, yet the openness fostering it may be eroding. While the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth.
Internet in a mid-life crisis
A number of factors are at blame for the present condition of the internet. Network operators are forced to erect security firewalls due to spam and hacking attacks.
Authoritarian regimes block access to many sites and services within their borders. And commercial considerations spur policies that can thwart rivals, particularly on mobile devices like the iPhone.
"There is more freedom for the typical Internet user to play, to communicate, to shop — more opportunities than ever before," said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "On the worrisome side, there are some lnger-term trends that are making it much more possible (for information) to be controlled."
Back on Sept. 2, 1969, about 20 people gathered in Kleinrock's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, to watch two bulky computers passing meaningless test data through a 15-foot gray cable, unknown to a number of people. That marked the beginning of the fledgling Arpanet network. Stanford Research Institute joined a month later, and UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah did by year's end.
The 1970s saw the birth of e-mail and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which allowed multiple networks to connect — and formed the Internet. The '80s gave birth to an addressing system with suffixes like ".com" and ".org" which are in widespread use today.
It was only in the '90s that the internet became a household name, though, after a British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the Web, a subset of the Internet that makes it easier to link resources across disparate locations. Meanwhile, service providers like America Online connected millions of people for the first time.
That early obscurity helped the Internet blossom, free from regulatory and commercial constraints that might discourage or even prohibit experimentation.
"For most of the Internet's history, no one had heard of it," Zittrain said. "That gave it time to prove itself functionally and to take root."
Even the US government, which funded much of the Internet's early development as a military project, left it alone after a while, allowing its engineers to promote their ideal of an open network.
When Berners-Lee, working at a European physics lab, invented the Web in 1990, he could release it to the world without having to seek permission or contend with security firewalls that today treat unknown types of Internet traffic as suspect.
Even the free flow of pornography led to innovations in Internet credit card payments, online video and other technologies used in the mainstream today.
"Allow that open access, and a thousand flowers bloom," said Kleinrock, a UCLA professor since 1963. "One thing about the Internet you can predict is you will be surprised by applications you did not expect."
On desktop computers, some Internet access providers have erected barriers to curb bandwidth-gobbling file-sharing services used by their subscribers.
The episode galvanized calls for the government to require ‘net neutrality’, which essentially means that a service provider could not favor certain forms of data traffic over others. But that wouldn't be a new rule as much as a return to the principles that drove the network Kleinrock and his colleagues began building 40 years ago.
Even if service providers don't actively interfere with traffic, they can discourage consumers' unfettered use of the Internet with caps on monthly data usage. Some access providers are testing drastically lower limits that could mean extra charges for watching just a few DVD-quality movies online.
While Apple insists its reviews are necessary to protect children and consumer privacy and to avoid degrading phone performance, other phone developers are trying to preserve the type of openness found on desktop computers. Google's Android system, for instance, allows anyone to write and distribute software without permission.
Yet even on the desktop, other barriers get in the way.
Steve Crocker, an Internet pioneer who now heads the startup Shinkuro Inc., said his company has had a tough time building technology that helps people in different companies collaborate because of security firewalls that are ubiquitous on the
Internet. Simply put, firewalls are designed to block incoming connections, making direct interactions between users challenging, if not impossible.
Removal of all barriers is not an option, of course. Security firewalls and spam filters became crucial as the Internet grew and attracted malicious behavior, much as traffic lights eventually had to be erected as cars flooded the roads. Removing those barriers could create larger problems.
What the Internet's leading engineers are trying to avoid are barriers that are so burdensome that they squash emerging ideas before they can take hold.
Already, there is evidence of controls at workplaces and service providers slowing the uptake of file-sharing and collaboration tools. Video could be next if consumers shun higher-quality and longer clips for fear of incurring extra bandwidth fees. Likewise, startups may never get a chance to reach users if mobile gatekeepers won't allow them.
If such barriers keep innovations from the hands of consumers, we may never know what else we may be missing along the way.
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