76 March 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
THE INTERNET’S DEMISE has been repeat-
edly forecast by any number of storm crows
over the years. There is the 1997 predic-
tion based on an increasingly loaded net-
work spurred by the rapid growth of users,
servers, websites, and content. There
were earlier predictions of a “Gigalapse”^1
by Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe.
Others thought ATM or Frame Relay would
replace TCP/IP.^2 Then came Multi-proto-
col Label Switching. Of course, there were
many years during which it was expected
by many, including governments, that the
Open Systems Internetworking (OSI) stan-
dards would prevail over the internet’s TCP/
IP. Interestingly, as the 2000s arrived, high
speed, broadband cable, and fiber modems,^3
along with digital subscriber loops,^4 prom-
ised higher capacity in the core and access
components of the internet. Other chal-
lenges have appeared. In 2011, the primary
source of IP address space, the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Num-
bers (ICANN), ran out of freely available
32-bit IPv4 addresses. By that time, how-
ever, the 128-bit IPv6^5 address and packet
format had long been standardized but
not very widely implemented. That is still
A Few
Words from
Vint Cerf,
Father of the
Internet
Corrugated-Metal Roofing
Makes Back-Yard Castle
NOVEMBER 1957Sea Contains Enough
We a l t h t o Ma ke
Everybody Rich
FEBRUARY 1934O C T O B E R
1995(^1) Prediction that an internet outage would exceed one
billion lost user hours.
(^2) These are rules (“protocols,” in geek speak) and
methods for how information travels over networks.
Like the differences between alternating current
and direct current, you have to pick one so things can
be designed to work with other things. Today, we
primarily communicate with TCP/IP.
(^3) Going from dial-up to modern high-speed internet,
and then Wi-Fi, involved many VHS-versus-Betamax-
type competitions for the next standardized format
for how computers talk to one another.
(^4) More commonly called DSL, or digital subscriber line,
this technology made it possible to send digital data over
telephone lines. It was a big element in the jump from
dial-up to high-speed without requiring huge retrofit
efforts.
(^5) IPv4 and IPv6 and ICANN are how devices identify
themselves on the greater internet and correctly
direct traffic. It’s similar to physical addresses for
houses.
(^6) It really is miraculous how well the overall internet
works—so much that the modern problems are more
sociological than technological.
a challenge as only about 30 percent of the
internet is estimated to be configured to
support IPv6. Most edge devices and rout-
ers have the necessary software but many
ISPs have not turned it on.
There are additional challenges surfacing
but these are less about basic technology
than they are about abusive behaviors
found especially in online social media but
more generally in all layers of the internet
and the World Wide Web. The software- and
network-driven Internet of Things offers a
huge attack surface that is already being
exploited by bad actors. Disinformation,
misinformation, fraud, propaganda, and
other content ills are infecting popular
information channels, challenging users to
think far more critically about the quality
of information they receive or discover
online.^6
When I wrote this article
as the electronics editor
of Popular Mechan-
ics, the Web was just
six years old. Dial-up
connections ruled. There
was no Google, no Face-
book, no Wikipedia, no
Yo uTu b e, n o Tw i t te r.
There was no Hulu, no
Spotify, no Instagram.
There was no Cloud
computing. There were
no smartphones. Netflix
was founded that year,
but as a rent-by-mail
DVD company, not the
internet behemoth it is
now, slinging trillions of
bits over the Net every
day—hundreds of thou-
sands times the total
internet traffic of 1997.
Back then, the internet
was used mainly for email,
news groups, and to
access the relative hand-
ful of websites that were
around, like book-seller
Amazon, eBay, and the
Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite
portals. Was the inter-
net dying? No. That was
hyperbole. But it was at
a crossroads. Something
had to be done to accom-
modate the incredible
increase of data traffic
we knew was coming and
the looming shortage of
address space.
Soon after that article
ran, the internet back-
bone was expanded and
strengthened. Tens of
thousands of miles of
undersea fiber-optic
cables were installed,
truly making the Web
worldwide.
Since then, data-
intensive providers like
Netflix, Google, and Face-
book have changed the
way data is routed over
the internet by building
private content-delivery
networks (CDNs) that run
in parallel to the internet
backbone. These CDNs
eliminate choke points
and deliver data quickly,
providing uninterrupted
video to your smart TV
or to smartphones in far-
flung corners of the globe.
And the IPv6 address-
ing scheme, introduced
in 1998, is being imple-
mented with enough
capacity for billions of
unique addresses for
every living person. Over-
kill? Perhaps. But consider
how popular such devices
as smart speakers and
connected thermostats
and lights are today.
Then remember that the
Internet of Things is still
in its infancy, much like
the internet itself was in
- Tomorrow’s appli-
cations haven’t even been
dreamed up yet. What-
ever they are, you can be
sure that the internet will
be ready to take on the
challenge. It won’t die.
We can’t let it.