36 | New Scientist | 26 October 2019
Initially, it connected just a small
bunch of like-minded academics. “It was
extremely useful for transferring data and
communicating among dispersed groups
of scientists,” says Grant Blank at the
Oxford Internet Institute in the UK.
There was no formal policing, but people
rarely misbehaved. As an MIT computing
handbook covering network etiquette noted,
“Sending electronic mail over the ARPAnet
for commercial profit or political purposes is
both anti-social and illegal. By sending such
messages, you can offend many people.”Wider still and wider
It was an “anything goes, free-for-all,
good-faith approach”, says Ryan – one that
has persisted as the internet has grown.
“A lot of the roots of issues that exist today
come from that period,” says Black.
The lack of built-in security was one such
example. “Basically, the default was to trust
everyone else,” says Black. Extending the
internet to public use opened it up to fraud
and criminal activity. As its use widened, the
net’s anonymity, with users identified only
by their IP address, also encouraged the
spread of misinformation and vitriol.
The widening of access came about through
a few pivotal software developments that took
advantage of the internet’s open ethos. Chief
among them was the World Wide Web. A
system of addressing and publishing protocols
that allowed documents sitting on different
computers to be publicly visible and linked
to one another, the web was created by
Tim Berners-Lee, then a researcher at the
CERN particle physics centre near Geneva,
Switzerland, in 1989. Berners-Lee also wrote
the first web browser in 1990, and the web
was made publicly available in 1991.
Although we now use “the internet” and
“the web” interchangeably, they aren’t the
same thing. “The internet is an infrastructure
on which so many things sit,” says Ryan.
“The web is just one of them.” Others are email,
which was an initial driving force behind many
people joining the internet, messaging apps
and file-sharing services. As these publicly
accessible parts of the internet have grown,
so too have parallel, shadier “dark net” services
(see “The dark side”, right).
The rest is modern history. Public web use
really took off in the mid-1990s, and with it
came the need to organise the available
information and make it easily accessible.
The development of search engines –
especially Google’s PageRank model, whichuses an algorithm to turn up relevant results
from more popular websites – changed the
online landscape forever, turning the web into
the trove of information it is today.
That, as well as the later explosion of social
media, paved the way for commercialisation.
The sheer number of eyeballs fixed on
sites such as Google and Facebook, and the
unprecedented ability to gather data about
individuals’ likes, preferences and moods and
sell it on to advertisers, have made the internet
a gold mine for a select few companies. Last
year, digital advertising accounted for more
than 85 per cent of the $136.8 billion revenue
of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.“ Profit, once
considered
antisocial, has
become the
internet’s raison
d’être”
The rise of powerful business interests
marked a shift in direction for the decentralised,
permissive guiding ideals of the internet. At the
outset, its egalitarian ethos had flattened power
and social hierarchies, but the lack of regulation
now enables seemingly limitless commercial
growth. Profit, once considered antisocial, has
become the internet’s raison d’être. Companies
that do things well – Alphabet, Amazon,
Facebook, Netflix – can achieve vast economies
of scale. “You have a winner-takes-all system
where a handful of companies can have
cascading monopolies,” says Ryan.
With that concentration of power, the
internet’s infrastructure has started to
centralise, too. The rise of cloud computing,
pioneered by companies such as Amazon,
means that more information flows via vast
server farms where it is stored and processed.
All this suggests a very different next
half-century for the internet. “It’s only with
regulation, and enforcement of regulation,
that you can see this centralising trend reverse
in any way,” says Ryan. The internet’s first
50 years have been a story of freewheeling
growth, for good and ill. The great question
we now face is whether anyone can and
should take control of it – and if so how. ❚