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The Internet has expanded, seemingly from nowhere, to become an essential part of modern living for people in developed countries over the space of only a decade or so. That’s faster than the telephone system was rolled out, faster than electric power, even faster than mobiles. What has driven this extraordinary growth? I give my ideas below, and as always there are some links at the end.

Q: The Internet – ten years ago, lots of us had barely heard of it. Now it’s everywhere. And that’s because it’s so useful – but how did it just happen?

A: It expanded so rapidly because it was useful. And it’s useful because it’s neutral to what runs over it. That’s it in a nutshell.

Q: What do you mean, neutral?

A: The Internet is just infrastructure. It’s not the world wide web, someone else invented that. It’s not email. It’s certainly not MSN or Windows Live. The Internet is simply a mechanism to move computer data around the world, whenever it is asked to, without asking any questions about what is in that data. All those other things I just mentioned are services that other people invented, that they could invent, because there was already an Internet to carry them. You can think of the Internet as power reticulation, or rather as more like the post service.

Q: So the Internet is the wires?

A: You can replace the wires, and more are added every day. The network we use every day that we call the Internet is a collection of computers and wires – mostly privately owned, that’s important – which are all operated as a cooperative. The heart of the Internet is a set of standards, rules if you like, for communication between computers across telecommunications links. These standards are called the RFCs, which standards for requests for comments, which is a rather diffident way of describing them. As I said, the physical structure of the Internet runs as a co-op. The RFCs define the rules of that co-op.

Q: So who creates these standards, and who enforces them?

A: They are mostly created by the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Architecture Board, which is a bunch of very bright engineers who get together a few times a year. There are some New Zealanders who make contributions to the IETF, including Nevil Brownlee of Auckland University. The group insists that technical standards are demonstrated to work, that two different people can implement them independently and have their implementations work together, and that the standard is unencumbered by patents and suchlike. As for who enforces them – if you don’t obey the standards, your stuff won’t work on the Internet. Their power is that they work. Among the people who run the Internet, RFCs have almost the status of holy writ.

Q: These standards, then, they set rules for the cooperation – they can’t just be about technology?

A: No – although lots are just about technology. Some of them allocate rights and responsibilities to the various players on the Internet and explain how they behave. There are several thousand of these RFC documents, each only few pages. One of them – RFC1958 – describes what it calls the “architectural principles of the Internet”. Now, before Radio New Zealand is besieged by emails and text from angry architects, I should point out that computer people use the term architecture to refer to a kind of high-level design of computers and networks. Anyway, according to this RFC, there are three architectural principles in the Internet. Number one is to run a single protocol or set of rules on the network. Number two is having those rules independent of the type of wires of computers in use of the network, and number three is keeping the network neutral – keeping for just for moving traffic from one place to another.

These are all really far-sighted and clever things to do. But I want to talk a specifically about the notion of keeping the network only for moving traffic. Internet folk call this the “end to end principle” – the notion that the network is just a network for moving traffic and all the interesting things happen in machines that are connected to the network rather than in the network itself. It’s very tempting to add intelligence to the network itself, and lots of companies have tried that in the past. There used to be other networks, separate from the Internet, called things like Prodigy and Compuserve. Even Teletext is an example. These networks all did things that their owners probably called “adding value” – they added information, which they probably called “content”, they adjusted their networks to give some kinds of traffic priority, and of course they sold access to their systems which is how they made their money.

The genius of the Internet was to get away from that. It’s just a network. It moves packets of data from place to place across the planet – and that’s the end of what it does. There is no content on the Internet.

Q: Surely the Internet is full of content?

A: No – remember, the Internet is just the wires and the rules that make it work. It’s not the World Wide Web – and we all know there is an enormous of content on web servers all over the world. They are connected to the Internet but they aren’t the Internet. The Internet isn’t email either, but email rides over it quite happily.

The point here is that the Internet was designed as a pure network that simply moves data around, without enquiring into the contents of the data, It was designed before YouTube, before the Web, before email. Once you have a neutral, open network, then anyone can design a service that runs over the top of it. There are dozens and dozens of services. Email is one of the earliest, and it’s also one of the most complicated in terms of how it’s implemented. Email could only be designed when you had a network for it to use. Then when email was working, more people wanted to use the Internet because; hey, it does email. How cool is that!

And it was the same story with the World Wide Web. The Internet had to exist before the Web could – but people liked the web so much that they rushed out and started buying Internet connections. And it’s been the same story again and again with things like Skype, instant messaging, Google Earth and so on. Someone comes up with an idea of something cool to run across the Internet, and they can just put it up and see if people like it. They don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. In the old pre Internet services like Prodigy, you only got whatever Prodigy wanted you to have. America On Line or AOL was the same; so was Compuserve. When the Internet started getting popular these services tried to reinvent themselves as some sort of Internet plus their proprietary services – they probably it “added value” or some such – but it didn’t fly because they were effectively breaking the end to end principle and making it difficult for their customers to get what all the ordinary Internet were getting.

The only one of those services that has survived to any great extent is AOL, and that did it by reinventing itself as an Internet Service Provider. It offers vanilla Internet with very little in the way of extras.

Q: So we can expect more and more interesting things to keep popping up on the Internet?

A: Yes, we are seeing more every year. As an example – my cell phone here runs Google Maps so I can lookup a map of anywhere in the world, change to satellite picture, get driving directions and so forth. Now it’s a relatively old phone, older than Google Maps anyway. But because Google Maps is designed to ride over commodity Internet, and the phone is designed to provide Internet access, I can get the latest things running on it without having to buy an expensive new phone. That’s the point of keeping the network neutral.

Q: So people have learned the lesson of neutral networks and have stopped trying to control the traffic on them?

A: No, of course they haven’t. There are always stupid and venal people out there who figure that if they can control the traffic flowing through the Internet they can ‘monetise’ it – that’s a piece of corporate jargon for blackmail, by the way. There are big telcos on the US who are saying things like: I’m not going to let Google have access to my broadband customers unless Google pays me. Well, those broadband customers have already paid for an Internet connection, and the Internet is a neutral network. The customers should control that connection, not the provider. If a network provider starts hindering people’s access to specific sites, or putting its own advertising over the top of them, sending you to their preferred partners for your online shopping, or anyone of several technical things it could do to try to change its customers’ surfing habits, it isn’t providing the Internet at all. What that provider is doing is trying to make some short term profits to the detriment of its customers and the Internet as a whole.

This is the subject of a big debate in the US, with large publicity campaigns running on both sides. The telecommunications lobby are trying very hard to prevent Congress legislating for network neutrality. They argue, for instance, that it’s necessary to encourage investment. The problem with that argument is that open Internet is what people pay to get to, and people don’t actually want a network that isn’t open. They don’t want their search results skewed to suit their telecommunications provider or extra advertising inserted into everything, or Skype made not to work properly by clever filtering.

Q: So the Internet was successful because it is neutral?

A: That’s a major factor in its success, certainly. And it will keep going and generating more and more innovative stuff, if we can only stop people from breaking it!

Links

RFC1958 describing the architectural principles of the Internet.

The inventor of the world wide web has written two blog entries on the importance of network neutrality.

Vint Cerf on Google’s plans to buy spectrum for mobile phones and open it up to all devices.