TIME article on the Internet

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

TECHNOLOGY
FIRST NATION IN CYBERSPACE




Twenty million strong and adding a million new users a month, the Internet
is suddenly the place to be




By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT




 Back in the mid-1960s, at the height of the cold war, the Department of
Defense faced a tough question: How could orders be issued to the armed
forces if the U.S. were ravaged by a nuclear assault? The communication
hubs in place at the time -- the telephone switching offices and the radio
and TV broadcast stations -- were not only vulnerable to attack, they
would also probably be the first to go. The Pentagon needed a military
command-and-control system that would continue to operate even if most of
the phone lines were in tatters and the switches had melted down.




 In 1964 a researcher at the Rand Corp. named Paul Baran came up with a
bizarre solution to this Strangelovian puzzle. He designed a
computer-communications network that had no hub, no central switching
station, no governing authority, and that assumed that the links
connecting any city to any other were totally unreliable. Baran's system
was the antithesis of the orderly, efficient phone network; it was more
like an electronic post office designed by a madman. In Baran's scheme,
each message was cut into tiny strips and stuffed into electronic
envelopes, called packets, each marked with the address of the sender and
the intended receiver. The packets were then released like so much
confetti into the web of interconnected computers, where they were tossed
back and forth over high-speed wires in the general direction of their
destination and reassembled when they finally got there. If any packets
were missing or mangled (and it was assumed that some would be), it was no
big deal; they were simply re-sent.




 Baran's packet-switching network, as it came to be called, might have
been a minor footnote in cold war history were it not for one contingency:
it took root in the computers that began showing up in universities and
government research laboratories in the late 1960s and early 1970s and
became, by a path as circuitous as one taken by those wayward packets, the
technological underpinning of the Internet.




 The Internet, for those who haven't been hanging out in cyberspace,
reading the business pages or following Doonesbury, is the mother of all
computer networks -- an anarchistic electronic freeway that has spread
uncontrollably and now circles the globe. It is at once the shining
archetype and the nightmare vision of the information highway that the
Clinton Administration has been touting and that the telephone and
cable-TV companies are racing to build. Much of what Bell Atlantic and
Time Warner are planning to sell -- interactivity, two-way communications,
multimedia info on demand -- the Internet already provides for free. And
because of its cold war roots, the Internet has one quality that makes it
a formidable competitor: you couldn't destroy it if you tried.




 Nobody owns the Internet, and no single organization controls its use. In
the mid-1980s the National Science Foundation built the high-speed,
long-distance data lines that form Internet's U.S. backbone. But the major
costs of running the network are shared in a cooperative arrangement by
its primary users: universities, national labs, high-tech corporations and
foreign governments. Two years ago, the NSF lifted restrictions against
commercial use of the Internet, and in September the White House announced
a plan to make it the starting point for an even grander concept called
the National Information Infrastructure.




 Suddenly the Internet is the place to be. College students are queuing up
outside computing centers to get online. Executives are ordering new
business cards that show off their Internet addresses. Millions of people
around the world are logging on to tap into libraries, call up satellite
weather photos, download free computer programs and participate in
discussion groups with everyone from lawyers to physicists to
sadomasochists. Even the President and Vice President have their own
Internet accounts (although they aren't very good at answering their
mail). ``It's the Internet boom,'' says network activist Mitch Kapor, who
thinks the true sign that popular interest has reached critical mass came
this summer when the New Yorker printed a cartoon showing two
computer-savvy canines with the caption, ``On the Internet, nobody knows
you're a dog.''




 But the Internet is not ready for prime time. There are no TV Guides to
sort through the 5,000 discussion groups or the 2,500 electronic
newsletters or the tens of thousands of computers with files to share.
Instead of feeling surrounded by information, first-timers (``newbies'' in
the jargon of the Net) are likely to find themselves adrift in a
borderless sea. Old-timers say the first wave of dizziness doesn't last
long. ``It's like driving a car with a clutch,'' says Thomas Lunzer, a
network designer at SRI International, a California consulting firm.
``Once you figure it out, you can drive all over the place.''




 But you must learn new languages (like UNIX), new forms of address (like
president () whitehouse gov) and new ways of expressing feeling (like those
ubiquitous sideways smiley faces), and you must master a whole set of
rules for how to behave, called netiquette. Rule No. 1: Don't ask dumb
questions. In fact, don't ask any questions at all before you've read the
FAQ (frequently asked questions) files. Otherwise you risk annoying a few
hundred thousand people who may either yell at you (IN ALL CAPS!) or,
worse still, ignore you.




 All that is starting to change, however, as successive waves of netters
demand, and eventually get, more user-friendly tools for navigating the
Internet. In fact, anyone with a desktop computer and a modem connecting
it to a phone line can now find ways into and around the network. ``The
Internet isn't just computer scientists talking to one another anymore,''
says Glee Willis, the engineering librarian at the University of Nevada at
Reno and one of nearly 20,000 (mostly female) academic librarians who have
joined the Internet in the past five years. ``It's a family place. It's a
place for perverts. It's everything rolled into one.''




 As traffic swells, the Internet is beginning to suffer the problems of
any heavily traveled highway, including vandalism, break-ins and traffic
jams. ``It's like an amusement park that's so successful that there are
long waits for the most popular rides,'' says David Farber, a professor of
information science at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the
network's original architects. And while most users wait patiently for the
access and information they need, rogue hackers use stolen passwords to
roam the network, exploring forbidden computers and reading other people's
mail.




 How big is the Internet? Part of its mystique is that nobody knows for
sure. The only fact that can be measured precisely is the number of
computers directly connected to it by high-speed links -- a figure that is
updated periodically by sending a computer program crawling around like a
Roto-Rooter, tallying the number of connections (last count: roughly 2
million). But that figure does not include military computers that for
security reasons are invisible to other users, or the hundreds of people
who may share a single Internet host. Nor does it include millions more
who dial into the Internet through the growing number of commercial
gateways, such as Panix and Netcom, which offer indirect telephone access
for $10 to $20 a month. When all these users are taken into account, the
total number of people around the world who can get into the Internet one
way or another may be 20 million. ``It's a large country,'' says Farber of
the Internet population. ``We ought to apply to the U.N. as the first
nation in cyberspace.''




 That nation is about to get even bigger as the major commercial computer
networks -- Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, GEnie and Delphi Internet
Service -- begin to dismantle the walls that have separated their private
operations from the public Internet. The success of the Internet is a
matter of frustration to the owners of the commercial networks, who have
tried all sorts of marketing tricks and still count fewer than 5 million
subscribers among them. Most commercial networks now allow electronic mail
to pass between their services and the Internet. Delphi, which was
purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. in September, began providing its
customers full Internet access last summer. America Online (which
publishes an electronic version of Time) is scheduled to begin offering
limited Internet services later this month.




 People who use these new entry points into the Net may be in for a shock.
Unlike the family-oriented commercial services, which censor messages they
find offensive, the Internet imposes no restrictions. Anybody can start a
discussion on any topic and say anything. There have been sporadic
attempts by local network managers to crack down on the raunchier
discussion groups, but as Internet pioneer John Gilmore puts it, ``The Net
interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.''




 The casual visitor to the newsgroups on the Usenet (a bulletin-board
system that began as a competitor to the Internet but has been largely
subsumed by it) will discover discussion groups labeled, according to the
Net's idiosyncratic cataloging system, alt.sex.masturbation,
alt.sex.bondage and alt.sex.fetish.feet. On Internet Relay Chat, a global
24-hour-a-day message board, one can stumble upon imaginary orgies played
out with one-line typed commands (``Now I'm taking off your shirt . .
.''). In alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, a user can peek at snapshots that
would make a sailor blush.




 But those who focus on the Internet's sexual content risk missing the
point. For every sexually oriented discussion group there are hundreds on
tamer and often more substantial topics ranging from bungee jumping to
particle physics. Last week Virginia college student Chris Glover
responded to a distressed message from a suicidal undergraduate in Denver.
After two hours of messages back and forth, Glover was able to pinpoint
the woman's location and call for help.




 With all this variety, Internet users are unimpressed by television's
promise of a 500-channel future. The Internet already delivers 10,000
channels, and the only obstacle that prevents it from carrying live TV
pictures is the bandwidth (or carrying capacity) of the data lines. Some
video clips -- and at least one full-length video movie -- are already
available on the network. And last spring, writer Carl Malamud began using
the Internet to distribute a weekly ``radio'' interview show called Geek
of the Week. Malamud is undeterred by the fact that it takes a computer
about an hour over a high-speed modem to capture the 30 minutes of sound
that a $10 radio can pick up instantly for free. But bandwidth capacity
has nowhere to go but up, says Malamud, and its cost will only go down.




 The Internet, however, will have to go through some radical changes
before it can join the world of commerce. Subsidized for so long by the
Federal Government, its culture is not geared to normal business
activities. It does not take kindly to unsolicited advertisements; use
electronic mail to promote your product and you are likely to be inundated
with hate mail directed not only at you personally but also at your
supervisor, your suppliers and your customers as well. ``It's a perfect
Marxist state, where almost nobody does any business,'' says Farber. ``But
at some point that will have to change.''




 The change has already begun. NSF's contribution now represents about 10%
of the total cost of the network, and the agency is scheduled to start
phasing out its support next April, removing at the same time what few
restrictions still remain against commercial activity. According to Tim
O'Reilly, president of O'Reilly & Associates, a publisher experimenting
with advertiser-supported Internet magazines, the system could evolve in
one of two ways: either entrepreneurs will manage to set up shop on a
free-market version of the Internet, or some consortium will take the
whole thing over and turn it into a giant CompuServe. ``That's an
outcome,'' O'Reilly says, ``that would effectively destroy the Internet as
we know it.''




 As the traffic builds and the billboards go up, some Internet veterans
are mourning the old electronic freeway. ``I feel kind of sad about it,''
says Denise Caruso, editorial director of Friday Holdings, a publisher
specializing in new media. ``It was such a dynamic, pulsing thing. I
wonder whether we shouldn't have left it alone.'' Others see the period of
uncertainty ahead as a rare opportunity for citizens to shape their own
technological destiny. ``We need . . . a firm idea of the kind of media
environment we would like to see in the future,'' warns Howard Rheingold
in his new book, The Virtual Community. While it may be difficult for
communities as diverse as those on the Internet to set their own agenda,
it seems increasingly likely that if they don't, someone else will do it
for them.




With reporting by David S. Jackson/San Francisco and Wendy King/Washington