IT BEGAN 鈥 some would say, as it meant to go on 鈥 with an error message. Late on the evening of 29 October 1969, student programmer Charles Kline from a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to another at the Stanford Research Institute, more than 500 kilometres up the Californian coast.
鈥淟OGIN鈥, it was supposed to say. Kline got as far as 鈥淟O鈥 before the system crashed. The full message was resent an hour later. What would eventually morph into the largest communications network in human history had made its debut: the internet.
Advertisement
It is fair to say that no one there quite appreciated the full scope of what had happened. 鈥淲e knew we were creating an important new technology that we expected would be of use to a segment of the population, but we had no idea how truly momentous an event it was,鈥 Leonard Kleinrock, Kline鈥檚 supervisor, later said. Fifty years on, we are still only just beginning to come to terms with the consequences.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, as the internet鈥檚 precursor is better known, was an academic project intended to allow computers to share information. Funded by the US Department of Defense, the UCLA and Stanford computers were the first two nodes of this network. By December 1969, two others had been installed: at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
In 1973, ARPANET went international, connecting via satellite to nodes at the in Kjeller near Oslo and . Today, a backbone of fibre-optic cables under sea and land, supplemented by satellite links and lower-tech copper telephone wires, ensure near-global coverage (see 鈥The greatest network the world has ever seen: the global internet map鈥).
Key features of how the modern internet works were there right from these small beginnings. Crucially, there was no centralised control. ARPANET was a distributed 鈥渘etwork of networks鈥. Information, broken into hundreds or thousands of small packets, travelled from node to node through or between these networks. If one node went offline, the information would find another way through, with each packet basing its trajectory on feedback from previous ones.
This concept, known as packet switching, had been developed in the early 1960s by three independent groups of researchers in the UK and US, including Kleinrock鈥檚 team. 鈥淚t made for a very resilient system,鈥 says at tech firm Brave, author of A History of the Internet and the Digital Future. 鈥淭hese packets are blindly going through the network trying to find a quick route.鈥
Shared communication required a shared language. That came in the form of a set of standards known as TCP/IP 鈥 the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol 鈥 first made public by computer scientists Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974 (see 鈥Internet founder Vint Cerf looks to the next 50 years of his creation鈥). These covered, among other things, the standard format of data packets and a unified system of addressing so that networks could identify one another. Such IP addresses are still assigned to all networked computers today.
鈥淭hat was a breakthrough,鈥 says , a computer scientist at the University of Southampton, UK. Open and free, TCP/IP enabled anybody to put a computer on the network, and any computer to talk to another. On 1 January 1983, ARPANET adopted it as its standard for 鈥渋nternetworking鈥, and the modern internet was born.
Initially, it connected just a small bunch of like-minded academics. 鈥淚t was extremely useful for transferring data and communicating among dispersed groups of scientists,鈥 says at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. There was no formal policing, but people rarely misbehaved. As an covering network etiquette noted, 鈥淪ending electronic mail over the ARPAnet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal. By sending such messages, you can offend many people.鈥
Wider still and wider
It was an 鈥渁nything goes, free-for-all, good-faith approach鈥, says Ryan 鈥 one that has persisted as the internet has grown. 鈥淎 lot of the roots of issues that exist today come from that period,鈥 says Blank.
The lack of built-in security was one such example. 鈥淏asically, the default was to trust everyone else,鈥 says Blank. Extending the internet to public use opened it up to fraud and criminal activity. As its use widened, the net鈥檚 anonymity, with users identified only by their IP address, also encouraged the spread of misinformation and vitriol.
The widening of access came about through a few pivotal software developments that took advantage of the internet鈥檚 open ethos. Chief among them was the World Wide Web. A system of addressing and publishing protocols that allowed documents sitting on different computers to be publicly visible and linked to one another, the web was created by Tim Berners-Lee, then a researcher at the CERN particle physics centre near Geneva, Switzerland, in 1989. Berners-Lee also wrote the first web browser in 1990, and the web was made publicly available in 1991.
Although we now use 鈥渢he internet鈥 and 鈥渢he web鈥 interchangeably, they aren鈥檛 the same thing. 鈥淭he internet is an infrastructure on which so many things sit,鈥 says Ryan. 鈥淭he web is just one of them.鈥 Others are email, which was an initial driving force behind many people joining the internet, messaging apps and file-sharing services. As these publicly accessible parts of the internet have grown, so too have parallel, shadier 鈥渄ark net鈥 services (see 鈥The dark side鈥).
The rest is modern history. Public web use really took off in the mid-1990s, and with it came the need to organise the available information and make it easily accessible. The development of search engines 鈥 especially Google鈥檚 PageRank model, which uses an algorithm to turn up relevant results from more popular websites 鈥 changed the online landscape forever, turning the web into the trove of information it is today.
鈥淧rofit, once considered antisocial, has become the internet鈥檚 raison d鈥櫭猼re鈥
That, as well as the later explosion of social media, paved the way for commercialisation. The sheer number of eyeballs fixed on sites such as Google and Facebook, and the unprecedented ability to gather data about individuals鈥 likes, preferences and moods and sell it on to advertisers, have made the internet a gold mine for a select few companies. Last year, digital advertising accounted for of the $136.8 billion revenue of Google鈥檚 parent company, Alphabet.
The rise of powerful business interests marked a shift in direction for the decentralised, permissive guiding ideals of the internet. At the outset, its egalitarian ethos had flattened power and social hierarchies, but the lack of regulation now enables seemingly limitless commercial growth. Profit, once considered antisocial, has become the internet鈥檚 raison d鈥櫭猼re. Companies that do things well 鈥 Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix 鈥 can achieve vast economies of scale. 鈥淵ou have a winner-takes-all system where a handful of companies can have cascading monopolies,鈥 says Ryan.
With that concentration of power, the internet鈥檚 infrastructure has started to centralise, too. The rise of cloud computing, pioneered by companies such as Amazon, means that more information flows via vast server farms where it is stored and processed.
All this suggests a very different next half-century for the internet. 鈥淚t鈥檚 only with regulation, and enforcement of regulation, that you can see this centralising trend reverse in any way,鈥 says Ryan. The internet鈥檚 first 50 years have been a story of freewheeling growth, for good and ill. The great question we now face is whether anyone can and should take control of it 鈥 and if so how.
The dark side
Right from the beginning, the internet has had its shadowlands: parts of the network deliberately hidden from public view. The original 鈥渄ark net鈥 comprised nodes on ARPANET that received messages but didn鈥檛 appear in network lists, or acknowledge or respond to messages. Today, perhaps the most prominent example of the dark net is the Tor network, which enables users to disguise their identities and communicate anonymously. An acronym for 鈥渢he onion router鈥, Tor involves layers of encryption, analogous to the layers of an onion, that let someone send data without their computer鈥檚 unique IP address being revealed.
Just as the internet is often confused with the web, the dark net is often muddled with the deep web, the parts of the web that aren鈥檛 typically indexed by search engines such as Google. That has many legitimate uses. Indeed, most of us are part of the deep web if we use webmail, a company intranet or a restricted-access social-media profile.
The dark net and Tor are most often associated in people鈥檚 minds with illicit trading in commodities like drugs and arms on online markets such as the now-shuttered Silk Road. But the anonymity the dark net affords can also facilitate whistle-blowing and protect users living under authoritarian regimes from censorship 鈥 a not inconsiderable boon, given the pressures the internet is under today (see 鈥Tech giants, states or trolls: Who will control tomorrow鈥檚 internet?鈥).
Article amended on 13 November 2019
We have corrected the spelling of Grant Blank鈥檚 name
