Download The Politics of the Internet

The Politics of the Internet - Week Two
Outline of Week




Discuss the history of the Internet
 Origins in ARPANET
 Creation of WWW
Discuss what the Internet is.
 Different layers
Discuss how the Internet is run
 IETF, ICANN etc
Discuss ‘topology’ of the Internet
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
How did the Internet begin?
 Almost by accident
 The idea of a distributed system of
communication.
 For academic institutions engaged in
military research
 Helped in sharing of computer resources
 More likely to survive nuclear war

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
The initial proposal - ARPANET
Set up by the ARPA – a subsection of the
US Department of Defense
 US company created in late 1969
 (a) The software to manage a network
 (b) A network that joined together a few
computers on the East and West coast

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
ARPANET – key features




ARPANET aspired to be distributed – it was
designed so that information could move without
central organization
Completely different from phone system
ARPANET was also designed to allow different
systems to communicate (through specialized
computers called IMPs).
Thus, emphasis on sharing information and
connecting networks rather than imposing a
common design.
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Unexpected consequences
ARPANET was supposed to be all about
sharing of computer resources for research
 No commercial uses were allowed
 Ended up being a lot more
 Invention of email, and @ symbol in
early 1970s – a big surprise
 First computer game, “Adventure”

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
ARPANET was run by scientists and
enthusiasts
 Decisions about how the Internet would be
run were taken by consensus
 Easy to manage when there were only a
couple of hundred people really involved

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Origins of the Internet
As ARPANET grew, people began thinking
about how to connect it to other networks.
 A new initiative – “The Internetting
Project”
 In 1974, creation of TCP/IP, the foundation
of the Internet
 Protocol allowed reliable communication
between very different computers.

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Spread of the Internet
In the 1980’s other networks began to
emerge using the Internet standard
 This was the “Internet”
 But still confined to academics
 Technically challenging and unattractive for
everyday users.

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Creation of the World Wide Web
Key step in bringing the Internet to the
masses was the World Wide Web
 Invented in CERN by Tim Berners-Lee
 Idea was to create a way in which
documents could be organized on the
Internet
 And could link to each other – with pictures
and attractive text

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Getting the World Wide Web off the ground
Took some years and effort to launch the
World Wide Web – even among academics
 A lot of resistance to it.
 Then, first major web browser was created,
Mosaic in the University of Illinois
 A smart student, Marc Andreesen wrote it,
and soon went off to found Netscape

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Netscape and the Web
Netscape opened up the Internet – people
began to realize that it had possibilities
outside universities and research institutions
 US government began to allow commercial
activity
 Creation of “dot coms” – Amazon, Ebay,
Toys.com, Pets.com etc

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
The Politicization of the Internet
The Internet became a more and more
commercial space
 Less room for old academic ethos of sharing
and cooperation
 Also became a much more political space
 Politicians started to get interested, firms
and consumers began to press for
regulation.

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Keeping the government out
US played key role in deciding how the
Internet was run
 US policy makers sought to keep
government out of the Internet
 Argued that the Internet could be run by
private actors, and by firms
 Didn’t always work out this way

The Politics of the Internet
Where we are today
Internet – and Internet policy is now a
major battleground
 Firms and governments fighting for their
interests
 Some of the old legacy persists
 Decentralization of ARPANET
 Consensus decision making on many
important issues

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Understanding the Internet



What is the Internet
Everyone thinks they
know – but
complicated
Take Senator Ted
Stevens
How the Internet actually works
Hint: it’s not a series of tubes …
 3 levels
 Physical infrastructure
 Communication Protocols (TCP/IP)
 Applications

The Road System
Routers, Network and Backbone
The Rules of the Road
TCP/IP – Packet Switching
Trucks, cars and buses
Applications layer
World Wide Web, Email, FTP
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
The Physical Infrastructure
• Basic Infrastructure
• A network of specialized computers.
• Routers – computers that receive and forward data
• Computers are connected by a network of pipelines
that carry the data
• Fattest pipelines make up the Internet “backbone”
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
The Physical Infrastructure II - Routers
Routers
 Computers receive data in packets
 Then send these packets on to another
router
 And so on, until the data reaches its final
destination

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
The Physical Infrastructure – The Network
How does the network operate in practice?
 Telephone/Cable/DSL connections (home
users) – connect to Internet Service
Provider
 Internet Service Provider buys bandwidth
on network from regional provider
 Regional provider buys space on backbone

Internet Connections – Map
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Mapping the Internet
How does information find its way around?
 Each computer on the Internet has an
unique address
 There are a small number of specialized
computers that maintain a directory of
which computer has which address
 When packets are sent, they refer to this
directory in order to figure out where to go

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
What is a Protocol?
Origins in Greek word, Protokollon, the
first index page of a manuscript.
 Modern use of the word means an
agreement between diplomats
 Use in technology is a combination of the
two
 A protocol defines the specific form in
which information is communicated.

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Communicating on a distributed network
Level Two – Communications Protocols
 TCP/IP – the fundamental cornerstone of the
Internet – allows packet switching
 Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Chopping information up



Information (say, an email) is chopped up into
“packets”
Each packet is then given a header (like the
envelope of a letter)
 Information about length of packet
 Where the packet fits
 Where it is going to
 How many other packets are out there
All of the packets are then sent out onto the
Internet.
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
“Packet switching” in practice
 Each packet may take its own route through
the Internet
 Different packets may go different ways –
depending on which parts of the network
are clogged
 Finally, all packets should reach the final
destination
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Reassembling Packets
Computer at the destination then puts
packets together again
 It knows which packets should go where
 It also can detect if a packet has gotten
garbled
 Or if a packet has gotten lost

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Applications
Applications protocols are TCP/IP
compatible ways of exchanging specific
information
 If TCP/IP is the traffic control system,
applications protocols are the vehicles.

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two

Examples
 Email – governed by a whole lot of
protocols – you really don’t want to know
how complex it is.
 FTP – File Transfer Protocol
 HTTP – the basic protocol underlying
communication on the World Wide Web
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Who runs the Internet





The answer is really, really complicated
It depends on which of the three layers you are
talking about
(1) Physical infrastructure – run by a mix of firms
and government
(2) TCP/IP run by the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF)
 Domain name system run by ICANN
Other protocols run by different groups within the
IETF
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
The physical infrastructure
Used to be run by the US government
 But now more and more dominated by
private firms
 Have created their own fast speed
communications networks
 Government and military still have some
role

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
The TCP/IP protocol
Who created the TCP/IP protocol, and who
can change it?
 NOT the US government
 NOT the governments of the world
 NOT big business (although it is getting
more and more of a voice)

Programmers
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
The IETF
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
 Non-hierarchical organization
 Discusses changes to TCP/IP and a lot of
other protocols
 And then announces them – by and large,
people adopt these changes, although the
IETF has no formal powers.

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
ICANN
There is a complicated relationship with
ICANN – “The Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers.”
 ICANN was set up to administer Domain
Name System – i.e. which computer on the
system gets which name
 Has become more and more controversial

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
The W3 Consortium
The World Wide Web (WWW) is slightly
different
 It relies on a language called HTML
(HyperText Markup Language) and HTTP
(HyperText Transfer Protocol)
 This language is developed by a IETF-type
organization called the W3 Consortium
 Same sorts of processes of decision-making.

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Who controls other applications
Other aspects of application protocols are
handled by the IETF, or sometimes by
firms
 For example, Java is run by Sun
Microsystems
• Control of protocols is sometimes a
key commercial advantage
• This is apparent in old and new
Microsoft battles

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Network Topology
If the Internet is a network, what does it
look like?
 Network topology (i.e. the ‘shape’ of the
network) is key – it helps determine the
politics.
 Some kinds of network are much more
easily subjected to political control than
others.

Different Kinds of Network
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
What does the Internet look like
The Internet was supposed to be a
‘distributed’ network.
 This would have meant that it was highly
resistant to control, to breakdown and to
attacks.
 But in fact, the Internet has developed in an
unplanned way so that it isn’t a distributed
network in the proper sense of the word.

What The Internet Looks Like
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
Internet looks like something between a
distributed and a decentralized network –
i.e. some parts of the network are much
more important (have much more incoming
and outgoing links) than others.
 This means that it is much more subject to
disruption or to control than a classic
decentralized network.
 We’ll talk about the effects of this next
week.

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
What we have learned - History
Beginnings of Internet in ARPANET
 Distributed network
 Development of new, unforeseen uses
 Creation of TCP/IP
 Creation of World Wide Web
 Popularization of Internet
 New Political Issues

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
What we have learned – The Internet
Three Layers
 Physical infrastructure
 Routers, pipelines, backbone
 Communications protocol
 TCP/IP and packet switching
 Applications protocols
 Email, WWW, FTP

The Politics of the Internet – Week Two
How the Internet is run




Different Actors on different levels
Physical infrastructure
 Run by firms, some government role
Communications protocol/Domain names
 TCP/IP run by IETF
 Domain name system run by ICANN
Applications protocols
 Run by IETF, WWW consortium, firms
The Politics of the Internet – Week Two

Physical topology of the Internet
 Differences between centralized,
decentralized and distributed networks.
 Actual topology of the Internet
 What this means for the politics of
control.