What is the Internet?

In 1990 I wrote a paper looking at what was then called NREN, and now the Internet at Harvard. It Audiencedescribed what I had been working on at MIT and NYNEX, now Verizon, and before that at COMSAT, the ARPA Net, as a distributed open network.

Then in 2000, as I was building our my Internet backbone company in 20 countries I was Vice Chair of a National Academy Study on the future of the Internet. Eric Schmidt was Chair.  As I note then,

The Internet is a composite of tens of thousands of individually owned and operated networks that are interconnected, providing the user with the illusion that they are a single network. A customer who purchases Internet service is actually purchasing service from a particular Internet service provider (ISP) connected to this network of networks. The ISP in turn enters into business arrangements for connectivity with other service providers to ensure that the customer’s data can move smoothly among the various parts of the Internet. The networks that make up the Internet are composed of communications links, which carry data from one point to another, and routers, which direct the communications flow between links and thus, ultimately, from senders to receivers. Communications links to users may employ different communications media, from telephone lines to cables originally deployed for use in cable television systems to satellite and other wireless circuits. Internal to networks, especially larger networks, are links—typically optical fiber cables—that can carry relatively large amounts of traffic. The largest of these links are commonly said to make up the Internet’s “backbone,” although this definition is not precise and even the backbone is not monolithic.

Namely the Internet as we understand it and use it is merely an agreement on the use of the TCP/IP protocols. Local ISPs connect us up the chain eventually to a Tier 1 carrier who peers with others allowing ultimately universal connection. Now anyone can do the same thing but not allow universal interconnection. It is called using a Firewall. The Chinese use it all the time. I suspect this Blog is firewalled. As is I suspect many of my papers as are other academic papers.

In that report we further noted:

• “Hourglass” architecture. The Internet is designed to operate over different underlying communications technologies, including those yet to be introduced, and to support multiple and evolving applications and services. It does not impede or restrict particular applications (although users and ISPs may make optimizations reflecting the requirements of particular applications or classes of applications). Such an architecture enables people to write applications that run over it without knowing details about the configuration of the networks over which they run and without involving the network operators. This critical separation between the network technology and the higher-level services through which users actually interact with the Internet can be visualized as an hourglass, in which the narrow waist represents the basic network service provided by the Internet and the wider regions above and below represent the applications and underlying communications technologies, respectively.

• End-to-end architecture. Edge-based innovation derives from an early fundamental design decision that the Internet should have an end-to-end architecture. The network, which provides a  communications fabric connecting the many computers at its ends, offers a very basic level of service, data transport, while the intelligence, the information processing needed to provide applications, is located in or close to the devices attached to the edge of the network.

• Scalability. The Internet’s design enables it to support a growing amount of communications—growth in the number of users and attached devices and growth in the volume of communications per device and in total, properties referred to as “scale.” Nonetheless, as is discussed below, the Internet currently faces and will continue to face scaling challenges that will require significant effort by those who design and operate it.

• Distributed design and decentralized control. Control of the network (from the standpoint of, for instance, how data packets are routed through the Internet) is distributed except for a few key  functions, namely, the allocation of address blocks and the management of top-level domain names in the Domain Name System. No single entity (organization, corporation, or government body) controls the Internet in its entirety.

Now Schmidt makes the news stating:

"I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America. If you look at China, and I was just there, the scale of the companies that are being built, the services being built, the wealth that is being created is phenomenal. Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage of the US, which is also a big number.  If you think of China as like 'Oh yeah, they're good with the Internet,' you're missing the point. Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you're going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There's a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc. Look at the way BRI works – their Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60-ish countries – it's perfectly possible those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has with some loss of freedom."

Then is it an Internet? It lacks the above characterizations. It may be a large but private network where one must play by a certain set of rules. There is no CCITT entity like the old telephone networks. Yes you can have a closed network. In fact that is what we should have for banks, power utilities and the like. But then it is not the Internet.

We show this below. If the router tables are controlled and elimited and if the Tier 1 is also blocked to other Tier 1 networks then one cannt get anywhere but to an approved site. Simple.

In fact DoD has just such a network. It carries DoD traffic. It has done so since the mid 1980s.

Thus is this some new insight? Hardly. It is what you would expect from a Totalitarian state. Even Russia has a bifurcated network, and I assume that China does already. The Internet is an architecture, a way for building. Its embodiment may be open to all or open to a few. It really was never made to be secure, quite the contrary. If one had access then one had access. However getting access can be made non-trivial.

Therefore, we should expect, and in some cases such as banking and utilities, a multiplicity of "Internets". Some quite secure and one or more fully open. There is no surprise there at all.