Evolution of the Internet: 230 (Issues)

A major shift occurred as a result of the increase in scale of the Internet and its associated management issues. To make it easy for people to use the network, hosts were assigned names, so that it was not necessary to remember the numeric addresses. Originally, there were a fairly limited number of hosts, so it was feasible to maintain a single table of all the hosts and their associated names and addresses. The shift to having a large number of independently managed networks e. The DNS permitted a scalable distributed mechanism for resolving hierarchical host names e. The increase in the size of the Internet also challenged the capabilities of the routers.

Originally, there was a single distributed algorithm for routing that was implemented uniformly by all the routers in the Internet. As the number of networks in the Internet exploded, this initial design could not expand as necessary, so it was replaced by a hierarchical model of routing, with an Interior Gateway Protocol IGP used inside each region of the Internet, and an Exterior Gateway Protocol EGP used to tie the regions together.

This design permitted different regions to use a different IGP, so that different requirements for cost, rapid reconfiguration, robustness and scale could be accommodated. Not only the routing algorithm, but the size of the addressing tables, stressed the capacity of the routers. New approaches for address aggregation, in particular classless inter-domain routing CIDR , have recently been introduced to control the size of router tables.

As the Internet evolved, one of the major challenges was how to propagate the changes to the software, particularly the host software. Looking back, the strategy of incorporating Internet protocols into a supported operating system for the research community was one of the key elements in the successful widespread adoption of the Internet. This enabled defense to begin sharing in the DARPA Internet technology base and led directly to the eventual partitioning of the military and non- military communities.

Thus, by , Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people.

At the same time that the Internet technology was being experimentally validated and widely used amongst a subset of computer science researchers, other networks and networking technologies were being pursued. The usefulness of computer networking — especially electronic mail — demonstrated by DARPA and Department of Defense contractors on the ARPANET was not lost on other communities and disciplines, so that by the mids computer networks had begun to spring up wherever funding could be found for the purpose.

NSFNET programs to explicitly announce their intent to serve the entire higher education community, regardless of discipline. Indeed, a condition for a U. When Steve Wolff took over the NSFNET program in , he recognized the need for a wide area networking infrastructure to support the general academic and research community, along with the need to develop a strategy for establishing such infrastructure on a basis ultimately independent of direct federal funding. Policies and strategies were adopted see below to achieve that end.

It had seen the Internet grow to over 50, networks on all seven continents and outer space, with approximately 29, networks in the United States. A key to the rapid growth of the Internet has been the free and open access to the basic documents, especially the specifications of the protocols. The beginnings of the ARPANET and the Internet in the university research community promoted the academic tradition of open publication of ideas and results.

Internet privacy

However, the normal cycle of traditional academic publication was too formal and too slow for the dynamic exchange of ideas essential to creating networks. In a key step was taken by S. These memos were intended to be an informal fast distribution way to share ideas with other network researchers. At first the RFCs were printed on paper and distributed via snail mail. Jon Postel acted as RFC Editor as well as managing the centralized administration of required protocol number assignments, roles that he continued to play until his death, October 16, When some consensus or a least a consistent set of ideas had come together a specification document would be prepared.

Such a specification would then be used as the base for implementations by the various research teams. The open access to the RFCs for free, if you have any kind of a connection to the Internet promotes the growth of the Internet because it allows the actual specifications to be used for examples in college classes and by entrepreneurs developing new systems. Email has been a significant factor in all areas of the Internet, and that is certainly true in the development of protocol specifications, technical standards, and Internet engineering.

The very early RFCs often presented a set of ideas developed by the researchers at one location to the rest of the community. After email came into use, the authorship pattern changed — RFCs were presented by joint authors with common view independent of their locations. The use of specialized email mailing lists has been long used in the development of protocol specifications, and continues to be an important tool. The IETF now has in excess of 75 working groups, each working on a different aspect of Internet engineering. Each of these working groups has a mailing list to discuss one or more draft documents under development.

When consensus is reached on a draft document it may be distributed as an RFC. This unique method for evolving new capabilities in the network will continue to be critical to future evolution of the Internet.

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The Internet is as much a collection of communities as a collection of technologies, and its success is largely attributable to both satisfying basic community needs as well as utilizing the community in an effective way to push the infrastructure forward. The early ARPANET researchers worked as a close-knit community to accomplish the initial demonstrations of packet switching technology described earlier.

Likewise, the Packet Satellite, Packet Radio and several other DARPA computer science research programs were multi-contractor collaborative activities that heavily used whatever available mechanisms there were to coordinate their efforts, starting with electronic mail and adding file sharing, remote access, and eventually World Wide Web capabilities. In the late s, recognizing that the growth of the Internet was accompanied by a growth in the size of the interested research community and therefore an increased need for coordination mechanisms, Vint Cerf, then manager of the Internet Program at DARPA, formed several coordination bodies — an International Cooperation Board ICB , chaired by Peter Kirstein of UCL, to coordinate activities with some cooperating European countries centered on Packet Satellite research, an Internet Research Group which was an inclusive group providing an environment for general exchange of information, and an Internet Configuration Control Board ICCB , chaired by Clark.

In , when Barry Leiner took over management of the Internet research program at DARPA, he and Clark recognized that the continuing growth of the Internet community demanded a restructuring of the coordination mechanisms. The ICCB was disbanded and in its place a structure of Task Forces was formed, each focused on a particular area of the technology e. It of course was only a coincidence that the chairs of the Task Forces were the same people as the members of the old ICCB, and Dave Clark continued to act as chair. This growth was complemented by a major expansion in the community.

In addition to NSFNet and the various US and international government-funded activities, interest in the commercial sector was beginning to grow. As a result, the IAB was left without a primary sponsor and increasingly assumed the mantle of leadership. The growth in the commercial sector brought with it increased concern regarding the standards process itself.

Increased attention was paid to making the process open and fair. In , yet another reorganization took place. In , the Internet Activities Board was re-organized and re-named the Internet Architecture Board operating under the auspices of the Internet Society. The recent development and widespread deployment of the World Wide Web has brought with it a new community, as many of the people working on the WWW have not thought of themselves as primarily network researchers and developers. Thus, through the over two decades of Internet activity, we have seen a steady evolution of organizational structures designed to support and facilitate an ever-increasing community working collaboratively on Internet issues.

Commercialization of the Internet involved not only the development of competitive, private network services, but also the development of commercial products implementing the Internet technology. Unfortunately they lacked both real information about how the technology was supposed to work and how the customers planned on using this approach to networking. Many saw it as a nuisance add-on that had to be glued on to their own proprietary networking solutions: The speakers came mostly from the DARPA research community who had both developed these protocols and used them in day-to-day work.

About vendor personnel came to listen to 50 inventors and experimenters. The results were surprises on both sides: Thus a two-way discussion was formed that has lasted for over a decade. In September of the first Interop trade show was born. The Interop trade show has grown immensely since then and today it is held in 7 locations around the world each year to an audience of over , people who come to learn which products work with each other in a seamless manner, learn about the latest products, and discuss the latest technology.

Starting with a few hundred attendees mostly from academia and paid for by the government, these meetings now often exceed a thousand attendees, mostly from the vendor community and paid for by the attendees themselves. The reason it is so useful is that it is composed of all stakeholders: Network management provides an example of the interplay between the research and commercial communities.

In the beginning of the Internet, the emphasis was on defining and implementing protocols that achieved interoperation.

As the network grew larger, it became clear that the sometime ad hoc procedures used to manage the network would not scale. Manual configuration of tables was replaced by distributed automated algorithms, and better tools were devised to isolate faults. In it became clear that a protocol was needed that would permit the elements of the network, such as the routers, to be remotely managed in a uniform way.

The market could choose the one it found more suitable. SNMP is now used almost universally for network-based management. In the last few years, we have seen a new phase of commercialization. Originally, commercial efforts mainly comprised vendors providing the basic networking products, and service providers offering the connectivity and basic Internet services. This has been tremendously accelerated by the widespread and rapid adoption of browsers and the World Wide Web technology, allowing users easy access to information linked throughout the globe.

Products are available to facilitate the provisioning of that information and many of the latest developments in technology have been aimed at providing increasingly sophisticated information services on top of the basic Internet data communications. This definition was developed in consultation with members of the internet and intellectual property rights communities. The Internet has changed much in the two decades since it came into existence.

It was conceived in the era of time-sharing, but has survived into the era of personal computers, client-server and peer-to-peer computing, and the network computer. It was designed before LANs existed, but has accommodated that new network technology, as well as the more recent ATM and frame switched services.

It was envisioned as supporting a range of functions from file sharing and remote login to resource sharing and collaboration, and has spawned electronic mail and more recently the World Wide Web. But most important, it started as the creation of a small band of dedicated researchers, and has grown to be a commercial success with billions of dollars of annual investment. One should not conclude that the Internet has now finished changing. The Internet, although a network in name and geography, is a creature of the computer, not the traditional network of the telephone or television industry.

It will, indeed it must, continue to change and evolve at the speed of the computer industry if it is to remain relevant. It is now changing to provide new services such as real time transport, in order to support, for example, audio and video streams. The availability of pervasive networking i.

This evolution will bring us new applications — Internet telephone and, slightly further out, Internet television. It is evolving to permit more sophisticated forms of pricing and cost recovery, a perhaps painful requirement in this commercial world. It is changing to accommodate yet another generation of underlying network technologies with different characteristics and requirements, e. New modes of access and new forms of service will spawn new applications, which in turn will drive further evolution of the net itself.

The most pressing question for the future of the Internet is not how the technology will change, but how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed. As this paper describes, the architecture of the Internet has always been driven by a core group of designers, but the form of that group has changed as the number of interested parties has grown. With the success of the Internet has come a proliferation of stakeholders — stakeholders now with an economic as well as an intellectual investment in the network. We now see, in the debates over control of the domain name space and the form of the next generation IP addresses, a struggle to find the next social structure that will guide the Internet in the future.

The form of that structure will be harder to find, given the large number of concerned stakeholders. At the same time, the industry struggles to find the economic rationale for the large investment needed for the future growth, for example to upgrade residential access to a more suitable technology.

If the Internet stumbles, it will not be because we lack for technology, vision, or motivation. It will be because we cannot set a direction and march collectively into the future. The authors would like to express their appreciation to Andy Rosenbloom, CACM Senior Editor, for both instigating the writing of this article and his invaluable assistance in editing both this and the abbreviated version.

However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks. COM, V 5, pp. Kahn, Communications Principles for Operating Systems. The Internet a collection of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, etc.

Department of Defense to safeguard against the possibility of communications being intercepted in the event of a nuclear attack. The World Wide Web, a service accessible via the Internet, is invented. The Web is a system of information sites, which can be accessed over the medium of the Internet. The Web is now in the hands of millions of PC users. Filtering software screens outgoing messages from Bloomberg L. Obscenity on the Internet Federal obscenity laws apply to interstate and foreign issues, such as distribution; intrastate issues are mostly governed by state law.

Today, materials considered "obscene" can be sent from a computer in California to someone across the U. What state governs the issue of obscenity when the Internet can reach multiple areas? The Miller Test, which legally defines obscenity, is based on what is offensive in a certain "community," geographically defined as a city, state or region, not the United States as a whole. But the notion of "community" becomes blurred with the advent of the Internet as the geographic area of the Internet is nonexistent.

The Communications Decency Act CDA prohibits posting "indecent" or "patently offensive" materials in a public forum on the Internet, including web pages, newsgroups, chat rooms, or online discussion lists. Section states that Internet service and content providers are not liable for content posted by others on the Internet. The Child Pornography Prevention Act extends existing federal criminal laws against child pornography to computer media, outlawing all depictions including computer simulations of those "appearing to be" minors engaging in sexual activities.

The Court holds that the Internet is not a scarce resource such as broadcasting and is therefore entitled to the same First Amendment protection as print. Following this incident, Internet censorship in Austria has been very limited. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA criminalizes the production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that are used to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works, even when there is no infringement of copyright itself.

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This Act is criticized for providing the entertainment industry extraordinary latitude to undermine traditional limits to copyright such as fair use and the first sale doctrine. In , Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian citizen, is arrested under the DMCA at a hacker convention in Las Vegas where he had given a talk describing the weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book software.

The Child Online Protection Act COPA criminalizes making available on the Internet information that could be harmful to minors, defined as material that by "contemporary community standards" was judged to appeal to the "prurient interest" and that showed sexual acts or nudity including female breasts. The Supreme Court strikes down the law in because it overly threatens adult speech, is overbroad, and would chill expression.

Many legal experts, including the Information Commissioner, believe that many of the provisions in the Act violate the European Convention on Human Rights. While the question of whether a US company can be sued under French law is in the courts, Yahoo voluntarily takes down many of the pages. A lawsuit is brought against Napster, a file sharing service launched in , by copyright holders who are concerned about the economic effects of freely distributing copyrighted material. Four years later Napster is essentially terminated when a judge rules for the copyright holders.

A school student sues his school district because he was suspended for creating a website that contained the mock obituaries of two of his friends.

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The court rules that the student should not have been suspended and suggests that the case was beyond the power of school authorities to regulate at all. The group relies in part on software developed to read unique electronic codes, making it possible for law enforcement to monitor file-sharing networks. A survey of studies of filtering software programs reveals that filters massively over-block a wide variety of Internet content.