29 August 2020 | New Scientist | 23I
N JANUARY 1989,
two engineers – Cisco’s
Kirk Lougheed and IBM’s
Yakov Rekhter – sat down in
the cafeteria at a technology
conference in Austin, Texas.
The two men were looking to
work out a short-term fix to help
address problems with the way
data flowed across the fledgling
internet, which at the time
connected about 100,000
computers across the world.
In the spirit of finding a fudge,
they scribbled a new protocol
across either two or three napkins.
(They can’t recall how many
and didn’t keep the originals.)
This protocol was adopted as the
new standard for determining
which physical routes data would
take to traverse the network.
More than 25 years later, the
“three-napkin protocol” is still in
place. But in the meantime, the
internet has become critical global
infrastructure – central to the
business operations of many of
the world’s largest companies, the
planet’s information ecosystem
and the daily behaviour of about
half the people on Earth.
The protocol that Lougheed and
Rekhter devised – known as Border
Gateway Protocol (BGP) – in their
lunch break was far better than
either realised, but it isn’t what
you would design for a secure
global network that we all rely on.
The process works a little like
transponders to guide aeroplanes:
computers on the network can
tell you whether you are heading
MIin the right direction to get to,
CH
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RB
AN
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Comment
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could save us, writes
Annalee Newitz p24Letters
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a priority p26Aperture
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photography
prizewinners p28Culture
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society to think about
reproduction p34Culture columnist
Simon Ings is moved
by a film about a
UFO hunter p36for example, Paris. But there
is nothing stopping someone
from lying.
In one famous example,
Pakistani authorities looked to
block a YouTube video they had
deemed offensive and ordered
their internet providers to do
this. One company did so by using
BGP to direct anyone looking for
YouTube in Pakistan to a dead end.
No one had hacked or damaged
YouTube, but no one was directed
towards it. Unfortunately, this
new “route” to YouTube wasn’t
restricted only to this firm’s
users. Thanks to human error,the Pakistani internet provider
recommended its new route
across the world, taking down
YouTube for millions of users.
This is just a single example
of what happened with
one protocol. Users can be
misdirected, intercepted, blocked
and put at risk by numerous
vulnerabilities built into the
creaking infrastructure of the
internet, and efforts to fix it are
painfully and dangerously slow.
The internet was born as a
US-funded collaboration between
universities, with rules agreed
by common consent betweenthe academics involved. To this
day, the operation of the protocols
to make it work are set out not
in a rulebook, but in a collection
of “Requests For Comment”,
a passive-aggressive title chosen
to avoid conflict, and one that
has stuck for five decades.
The internet turned 50 last year.
For its first two decades, it grew
slowly between institutions that
already knew and trusted each
other, then exploded through
the 1990s and beyond to what
we have today. The opportunity
to retool the network, if it ever
existed, wasn’t taken. We can’t
rebuild from scratch; we have
to fix what we have.
One of the biggest challenges
in doing so is that the internet
is largely operated by consent
and by slow, grinding consensus.
There is no overseeing authority,
no one setting global laws.
This has happened not least
because, for most governments,
the only thing worse than no
one controlling the internet is
someone else controlling it. Yet
this lack of authority is a worry,
because our lives, our data, our
communications and our physical
infrastructure are moving online.
None of these issues will get
easier. The best time to decide who
runs the internet was decades ago.
The second-best time is now. ❚The fight for the internet
The internet’s infrastructure is starting to fall apart,
and that is leaving us all insecure, says James BallJames Ball is the author
of The System: Who
owns the internet,
and how it owns us