Openness is the internet's great strength – and
weakness. With powerful forces carving it up, is its golden age coming
to an end?
How quickly the world changes. In
August 1991 Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN near Geneva,
Switzerland, posted a message to a discussion forum detailing a new
method for sharing information between networked computers. To make his
idea a reality, he also set up a server
running on one of CERN's computers. A mere two decades later, some 2
billion of us are hooked up to Berners-Lee's invention, and the UN
General Assembly last month declared access to it a fundamental human right. It is, of course, the World Wide Web.
Today, most of us in the developed
world and elsewhere take the internet for granted. But should we? The
way it works and the way we engage with it are still defined by
characteristics it has inherited from its easy-going early days, and
this has left it under threat - from criminals, controlling authorities
and commercial interests. "The days of the internet as we used to think
of it are ending," says Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks, a security
software company in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Could we now be living in
the golden age of the internet?
Though it was the World Wide Web that
opened the internet to the world, the underlying structure dates back
much further. That architecture took shape in the early 1960s, when the
US air force asked Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica,
California, to come up with a military communications network that could
withstand a nuclear attack. Baran proposed a network with no central
hub; instead, information would pass from any point in the network to
any other through many decentralised switching stations, or routers.
For Baran's plan to work, every
message would be broken up into small packets of digital information,
each of which would be relayed from router to router, handed over like
hot potatoes. Dividing the message into packets instead of sending it
whole meant that communication links would only be busy during the
instant they were called upon to carry those packets. The links could be
shared from moment to moment. "That's a big win in terms of
efficiency," says Jon Crowcroft, a computer scientist at the University
of Cambridge. It also made the network fast and robust: there was no
central gatekeeper or single point of failure. Destroy any one link, and
the remaining routers could work out a new path between origin and
destination.
Baran's work paved the way for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (see "Internet evolution"),
which then led to the internet and the "anything goes" culture that
remains its signature. From then on, the internet was open to anyone who
wanted to join the party, from individual users to entire local
networks. "There was a level of trust that worked in the early days,"
says Crowcroft. No one particularly cared who anyone was, and if you
wanted to remain anonymous, you could. "We just connected and assumed
everyone else was a nice guy." Even the hackers who almost immediately
began to play with the new network's potential for mischief were largely
harmless, showing up security weaknesses for the sheer technical joy of
it.
These basic ingredients - openness,
trust and decentralisation - were baked into the internet at its
inception. It was these qualities, which allowed diverse groups of
people from far-flung corners of the world to connect, experiment and
invent, that were arguably the key elements of the explosive
technological growth of the past two decades. That culture gave us the
likes of Skype, Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
The internet's decentralised structure
also makes it difficult for even the most controlling regime to seal
off its citizens from the rest of the world. China and North Korea are
perhaps the most successful in this respect; by providing only a few
tightly controlled points of entry, these governments can censor the
data its people can access. But less restrictive countries, such as
South Korea, also splinter their citizens' experience of the web by restricting "socially harmful" sites.
Savvy netizens routinely circumvent such attempts, using social media
and the web's cloak of anonymity to embarrass and even topple their
governments. The overthrow of the Egyptian regime in February is being
called by some the first social media revolution. Though debatable, this assertion is supported in the book Tweets From Tahrir, an account told entirely through Twitter messages from the centre of the nation's capital.
It is tempting to think that things
can only get better - that the internet can only evolve more openness,
more democracy, more innovation, more freedom. Unfortunately, things
might not be that simple.
There's a problem on the horizon, and
it comes from an unexpected quarter - in fact from some of the very
names we have come to associate most strongly with the internet's
success. The likes of Apple, Google and Amazon are starting to fragment
the web to support their own technologies, products and corporate
strategy. Is there anything that can be done to stop them?
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