Humble beginnings
Something oft-mentioned is the fact that the Internet has its roots in a US Government Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project. This is occasionally thrown around as though it’s a damning indictment of the idea that the US still controls the Internet and everything which sails upon her.
The fact is, it’s pretty much irrelevant how it all came about. TCP/IP is popular now for a whole host of reasons, but being invented as part of a military-academic research tool doesn’t factor into it nowadays.
Over the course of history, human beings have become pretty good at inventing stuff more than once in independence. Network protocols and routing architectures are two-a-penny, and IP (and its associated periphery) was in the right place at the right time, like so many other things we take for granted nowadays.
Today, the Internet’s origins don’t really matter. There’s nothing stopping anybody technically competent from implementing an IP stack, and joining some computers together to make a network. People do the latter part of that every day of the week (but usually rely on somebody smarter to do the first bit).
Connect enough of those networks together in the right way, and you’ve got an internet. It sounds easy. In many respects it is—most of the real trials and tribulations of keeping the Internet running behind the scenes are technical, rather than political or commercial, and it’s technical people who sort it out. See NANOG for a glimpse into this thrilling world of internetwork engineering.
For years the governments of the world mostly ignored the Internet and its ISPs unless they had to. The fact is, a few years ago it was the preserve of the geeks and the academics. People like me (and depending on who you are, you) sat in front of Internet-connected computers for the first time thinking—or exclaiming—about how cool it was.
Ofcom didn’t make the Internet happen. Nor did the FCC. You want “revenge of the nerds”? Your last Amazon purchase was it. The Internet went viral, like so many things it’s used to spread. And like so many things which preceded it, it’s become essential to many—a integral part of huge numbers of people’s lives. Mostly by accident.
And, again like many things which preceded it, you can’t undo it. We can’t uninvent electricity or radio, and similarly we can’t put the genie that is the Internet back in its bottle or expect it to be controlled. Sure, you can control the people, like nations have attempted to do for thousands of years, but that gets a little bit harder when that genie is an instantaneous, cost-effective, global telecommunications system for human– and machine-readable information alike.
I’m not a naive little post-Y2K kiddie or a breathless journalist with a tendency towards hyperbolic protestations of the collapse of society as we know it. I’m just somebody who sees things for what they are. In the Internet’s case, I see an idea whose time arrived, and people caught on. I’m just curious as to whether I’ll be around to see what the next thing is which happens to be in the right place at the right time.
