NEW YORK - Goofy videos weren't on the minds of Len Kleinrock andhis team at UCLA when they began tests 40 years ago on what wouldbecome the Internet. Neither was social networking, for that matter,nor were most of the other easy-to-use applications that have drawnmore than a billion people online.
Instead the researchers sought to create an open network forfreely exchanging information, an openness that ultimately spurredthe innovation that would later spawn the likes of YouTube, Facebookand the World Wide Web.
There's still plenty of room for innovation today, yet theopenness fostering it may be eroding. While the Internet is morewidely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threatento constrict its growth.
Call it a mid-life crisis.
A variety of factors are to blame. Spam and hacking attacks forcenetwork operators to erect security firewalls. Authoritarian regimesblock access to many sites and services within their borders. Andcommercial considerations spur policies that can thwart rivals,particularly on mobile devices like the iPhone.
"There is more freedom for the typical Internet user to play, tocommunicate, to shop - more opportunities than ever before," saidJonathan Zittrain, a law professor and co-founder of Harvard'sBerkman Center for Internet & Society. "On the worrisome side, thereare some longer-term trends that are making it much more possible(for information) to be controlled."
Few were paying attention back on Sept. 2, 1969, when about 20people gathered in Kleinrock's lab at the University of California,Los Angeles, to watch as two bulky computers passed meaningless testdata through a 15-foot gray cable.
That was the beginning of the fledgling Arpanet network. StanfordResearch Institute joined a month later, and UC Santa Barbara andthe University of Utah did by year's end.
The 1970s brought e-mail and the TCP/IP communications protocols,which allowed multiple networks to connect - and formed theInternet. The '80s gave birth to an addressing system with suffixeslike ".com" and ".org" in widespread use today.
The Internet didn't become a household word until the '90s,though, after a British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented theWeb, a subset of the Internet that makes it easier to link resourcesacross disparate locations. Meanwhile, service providers likeAmerica Online connected millions of people for the first time.
That early obscurity helped the Internet blossom, free fromregulatory and commercial constraints that might discourage or evenprohibit experimentation.
"For most of the Internet's history, no one had heard of it,"Zittrain said. "That gave it time to prove itself functionally andto kind of take root."
Even the U.S. government, which funded much of the Internet'searly development as a military project, largely left it alone,allowing its engineers to promote their ideal of an open network.
When Berners-Lee, working at a European physics lab, invented theWeb in 1990, he could release it to the world without having to seekpermission or contend with security firewalls that today treatunknown types of Internet traffic as suspect.
Even the free flow of pornography led to innovations in Internetcredit card payments, online video and other technologies used inthe mainstream today.
"Allow that open access, and a thousand flowers bloom," saidKleinrock, a UCLA professor since 1963. "One thing about theInternet you can predict is you will be surprised by applicationsyou did not expect."
That idealism is eroding.
An ongoing dispute between Google Inc. and Apple Inc. underscoresone such barrier.
Like some other mobile devices that connect to the Internet, theiPhone restricts the software that can run on it. Only applicationsApple has vetted are allowed.
Apple recently blocked the Google Voice communicationsapplication, saying it overrides the iPhone's built-in interface.Skeptics, however, suggest the move thwarts Google's potentiallycompeting phone services.
On desktop computers, some Internet access providers have erectedbarriers to curb bandwidth-gobbling file-sharing services used bytheir subscribers. Comcast Corp. got rebuked by FederalCommunications Commission last year for blocking or delaying someforms of file-sharing; Comcast ultimately agreed to stop that.
The episode galvanized calls for the government to require "netneutrality," which essentially means that a service provider couldnot favor certain forms of data traffic over others. But thatwouldn't be a new rule as much as a return to the principles thatdrove the network Kleinrock and his colleagues began building 40years ago.
Even if service providers don't actively interfere with traffic,they can discourage consumers' unfettered use of the Internet withcaps on monthly data usage. Some access providers are testingdrastically lower limits that could mean extra charges for watchingjust a few DVD-quality movies online.
"You are less likely to try things out," said Vint Cerf, Google'schief Internet evangelist and one of the Internet's foundingfathers. "No one wants a surprise bill at the end of the month."
No comments:
Post a Comment