The History of the Internet:
In 1973 the U.S Defence Advantaged Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to develop communications protocols, which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and the system of networks, which emerged from the research, was known as the "Internet".
In 1986 the U.S National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the development of the NSFNET which, today provides a major backbone communication service for the Internet.
In Europe major international backbones such as NORDUNET and others provide connectivity to over one hundred thousand computers on a large number of networks.
In Europe and elsewhere, support arises from co-operative international efforts and through national research organisations. During the course of its evolution, particularly after 1989, the Internet system began to integrate support for other protocol suites into its basic networking fabrics. A great deal of support from the Internet community has come from the U.S Federal Government, since the Internet was originally part of the federal-funded research program and subsequently has become a major part of the U.S research infrastructure.
Who owns the Internet?
Nobody owns the Internet – everybody owns his or her piece of the Internet. Although industry executives, analysts and observers present the same general list of big infrastructure owners, they say there is no reliable way to measure exactly which company owns how much. One figure bandied about is that UUNet owns 30 per cent of the backbone, with everyone else falling in line behind. AT&T claims the No. 2 spot. Perhaps more important than placing numbers on ownership are the questions about what it means to have an ownership stake in the Internet, to have invested millions in getting the infrastructure up and keeping it running.
While various people interviewed contend that the Internet business is so competitive that new players will also emerge to take over if the big guns become too powerful and wield their influence unfairly, DiBiase and others suggest that it’s also the case that large infrastructure players and large service providers bolster each others position. As might be expected, executives at the large companies that own Internet infrastructure adamantly agree. Whatever their particular biases, it is worth noting that they deal in the market daily. Their companies all have to work with each other because the Internet consists of far-flung computer networks joined by cables, fiber optics and satellites owned by disparate companies.
When it comes to establishing Internet standards, each has a voice. While there is no doubt that large Internet-infrastructure owners have taken advantage of their size in business negotiations, Kleinrock and many executives who deal with the Internet on a day-to-day basis agree that no coterie of big players has so much power that it can shut down competition. The bottom line is that no one is in a position to close down the Internet.
Who Runs the Internet?
Much of the work that goes into defining and running the technical end of the Internet is done by a group of organisations loosely co-ordinated by the Internet Society: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and Steering Group (IRSG).
IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force, the IETF is the centre of Internet technical development efforts. Through numerous working groups, IETF members develop developing new protocols and technologies to handle everything from low level details of Internet routing to secure mail.
IESG: Internet Engineering Steering Group, the IESG is a committee that oversees the work of the IETF and directly approves protocol actions. IETF working groups are loosely categorised into 7 areas, each of which has one or two "area directors" who serve on the IESG.
IAB: Internet Architecture Board, The IAB provides technical oversight and advice to the IESG and IETF. According to their website, the IAB works to "stimulate action by the IESG or within the IETF community that will lead to proposals that meet general consensus." This generally involves activities including approval of proposed draft documents and considering long-term questions regarding the long-term future of the ‘Net.
IANA: Internet Assigned Number Authority, Based at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, IANA co-ordinates the assignment of unique numbers and names for use on the Internet.
IRTF: Internet Research Task Force, Working under the auspices of the IAB, The IRTF and the IRSG are the research counterparts to the applied work done by the IETF and IESG.
Education:
The stake that Universities hold in the Internet is enormous. Collaborative research, digital libraries, and distance education are a few examples. ‘Internet2’ is a consortium of educational institutions working to build the next generation Internet.
Internet Users:
As shopping, learning, and simply conversing become activities that are increasingly performed ‘on-line’; users will need to become informed participants in Internet governance in order to protect their interests. By voicing their interests and concerns, users can work to define a usable and constructive future for the Internet.
Business:
Day-to-day operation of the resulting private Internet is now the business of countless companies in a variety of industries. These include telecommunications, Internet Service Providers (ISP’s), cable TV companies, hardware, software, and Domain Name System (DNS) registrars and registries.
Internet Structure:
The Internet is a dynamic and mercurial system endowed with a number of traits. These are:
1. Technological neutrality. The Internet joins together computers of various sizes and architectures. They may run on various operating systems and utilise a great variety of communication links (Rutkowski 1994). The Internet, in a sense, is a giant multi-tasking environment, capable of accommodating a great range of participants and inputs.
2. Built-in piecemeal change and evolution. The Internet is not a one-off development. It is an energetic, polycentric, complex, growing, and self-refining system. It is a network, which is geared to expansion and growth. It is a system, which scales up extremely well. In December 1969 it comprised four interconnected machines. Exactly ten years later, in December 1979 it spanned 188 hosts. In October 1989 it linked 159,000 machines. In July 1998, it did the same for 36,739,000 machines (Zakon 1998). The Internet is, to borrow a phrase from Gabriel (1996:93) "a set of communicating components that work together to provide a comprehensive set of capabilities." The Net harnesses the energies of four distinct but mutually reinforcing and catalytic processes:
(a) Western culture's fascination (Tarnas 1996) with scientific research, technology, and information;
(b) The creativity of the Net's culture. This creativity is the necessary consequence (Rutkowski 1994) of a very large-scale, unregulated and polycentric archipelago of people and their data sets, machines for managing the data, and tools for instantaneous communication;
(c) The vanity of humans. Major technical discoveries and implementations are frequently carried out for no other reason than to give its inventors a spate of online fame (Dodd 1992, Rheingold 1994);
(d) Human greed. New technologies provide new financial vistas to entrepreneurs who put inventions to daily commercial use (Gabriel 1996). Some new technologies reduce the cost of routine operations (i.e. to use an Internet telephone costs less than to use a traditional telephone network). Also, new technologies create totally new products, services and markets. The emergence of online advertising, network connectivity services, webs hosting and cyberstores illustrates this point (Reid 1997, Yesil 1997).
3. Robustness and reliability. All basic technical features of the Net such as the TCP/IP (transfer control protocol/internet protocol), (Kessler and Shepard 1997), the multiplicity of routes followed by the packet-switched data, and the sturdiness of related software are designed to eliminate errors, to handle unexpected interruptions and interference’s, to advise users of encountered difficulties and to recover gracefully from any disasters and down-times.
4. Low cost. The Internet makes new uses of old technologies (standalone computers, operating systems, telecommunication networks). Whenever possible, Internet operations piggyback on already existing solutions. They rely on modularised, configurable, easy-to-replace, and easy-to-upgrade off-the-shelf software and hardware. The Internet not only creates new tools and resources, but also it recycles and rejuvenates several of the old ones (Levinson 1997).
5. Ubiquity. The robustness, modularization and low cost of the system is coupled with the growing densities of dedicated computer lines, network backbones, as well as wired and wireless phone networks. This means that Internet-enabled tools are deployed in ever growing numbers in an ever-widening range of environments (Gilster 1997, Kelly and Reiss 1998). The history of the Internet is that of a long-term move from experimental laboratories to university computing centres, and then to offices and business, schools, homes, museums, taxis, supermarkets and, finally, street-based consoles, kiosks and hand-held devices.