Chadwick Internet Politics Chapter 03

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www.andrewchadwick.com Andrew Chadwick Internet Politics Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Chapter 3 Presentation Contents Introduction Network logic Network building in the shadow of the cold war state: ARPANET TCP/IP and the founding values of Internet technology DIY and hacker culture in the 1970s and 80s From the net… … to the web Conclusion Discussion points Note: this presentation contains only a skeletal outline of the Chapter, and a small selection of the Figures, Tables and Exhibits. If you would like a particular item in PowerPoint format, please email me at : andrew.chadwick@rhul.ac.uk Network Logic: A Political Prehistory of the Internet

Introduction: 

Introduction Story of the Internet is a curious mixture of: Technical innovation State control Voluntarism DIY 'home-brew' culture Transnational collaboration Commercial competition

But…: 

But… From a social scientist's perspective the central questions are those we would expect to ask of any potentially significant change, namely: a) which actors, interests and institutions have had the most influence on how the Internet developed and b) what kind of technologies, organizational values and ideologies have underpinned it?

Network logic: 

Network logic 1960s – development of ‘time-sharing’ computing Invention of UNIX operating system in 1969 ‘democratized’ computing Joseph C. R. Licklider Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960); joined US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1962

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Started funding basic computer network research linking major Universities: Stanford, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, UCSB, along with Utah University and MIT. ARPA's organizational culture was infused with a combination of state sponsored military necessity and a freewheeling but serious spirit of scientific inquiry.

Network building in the shadow of the cold war state: ARPANET: 

Network building in the shadow of the cold war state: ARPANET 1966-69: continued development of ARPANET in heart of the US cold war defense establishment under direction of Lawrence Roberts. Militarism spurred developments, but also technocratic ideas and ‘pure’ scientific endeavour. eg. Leonard Kleinrock’s ‘packet-switching’ technology…

Packet-switching: 

Packet-switching Packet switching Flash animation from: http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/geek_glossary/packet_switching_flash.html

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Packet-switching attractive to DoD (communications system that could withstand military assault) and the scientific community (ideology of information sharing and free communication). End of 1960s: simple network with four nodes; by 1971, 15 nodes. Email added, 1972. Development continued via ‘requests for comment’ – democratic decision-making (?).

TCP/IP and the founding values of Internet technology: 

TCP/IP and the founding values of Internet technology Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf started work in 1972 on the idea of ‘open networking architecture’… 'Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet. Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn't make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source. Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes. There would be no global control at the operations level'. Source: see Chapter 3.

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Increasing international collaboration during 1970s, involving UCL, Bolt, Beranek and Newman (a private research consultancy), the French Cyclades team. Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) just south of San Francisco in what would soon become known as ‘Silicon Valley’. Open standards – eg. UNIX source code published free of charge in 1983.

DIY and hacker culture in the 1970s and 80s: 

DIY and hacker culture in the 1970s and 80s Dennis Hayes's invention of the dial up modem in 1977 Emergence of the first small-scale 'personal' computers in the mid-1970s ‘Home brew' subculture of computer clubs around the US and Europe, brought together by such publications as Byte magazine. Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines, a manifesto for 'New Freedoms Through Computer Screens' published the same year Personal computer users armed with modems caused 'unofficial' networks such as FIDONET to proliferate in the late 1970s. First 'Computerized Bulletin Board System' in late 1970s

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But technologies still restricted to the technically literate and those with enough spare cash (and time) No graphics No easy way to locate material Only in mid-late 1980s, with the invention of the Domain Name System (DNS) that the Net starts to look anything like it does today… DNS: initially created the domain suffixes .com, .gov, .net, .org, .mil, and .edu, and which subsequently allowed for country level domains such as .uk or .ca More intuitive communication network

From the Net…: 

From the Net… US government starts to invest heavily in the network in the late 1980s, under the aegis of the National Science Foundation New clashes of ideologies and organizational values: ‘science’ vs ‘commerce’; ‘cyberlibertarianism’ vs government ‘control’ and regulation DNS made the net an enticing prospect for businesses eager to sell goods and services to consumers First emergence of problem of how to ‘govern’ the Internet to protect it leads to establishment of an Internet Advisory Board (IAB) and an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1983, composed mainly of technicians

… to the Web: 

… to the Web Internet became fused with various private and commercial networks, owned and maintained by large corporations such as IBM, MCI, UUNET and PSINET. NSFNET backbone was fully 'privatized' and handed over to private network carriers in mid-1990s Invention of world wide web, hyperlinking and the graphical browser solved many usability problems Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at the CERN Laboratories in Geneva Marc Andreeson, Jim Clark – Mosaic, then Netscape. Microsoft – Internet Explorer Mass user base emerges in developed countries by late-1990s Governance problems emerge

Conclusion: 

Conclusion By late 1990s radically different user constituencies with competing visions of what the future should entail Scientific and research community joined by major telecoms providers, hardware manufacturers, software companies, media firms and government representatives in forming the Internet Society (ISOC) in 1992. Creation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994. Dominant players are commercial actors in the telecom, financial services, media and publishing businesses who wish to shape the future development and adoption of web standards

Discussion points: 

Discussion points How has the historical development of the Internet shaped its contemporary characteristics? Is TCP/IP a radical communication technology? How important is the 'DIY' or 'hacker' ethos for making sense of the Internet's development? Assess the impact of the World Wide Web and the graphical browser on the diffusion of the Internet.