<< Before: The Rise of the Internet, Part 2: The Emergence of Private and Public Companies
And now we come to the conclusion of the history of the emergence of the Internet. We traced the main story arc of internet development from the 1960s to the 1990s. In his youth, the network was nurtured by the government, Bell's company gave him space to grow and prosper, and the public caught the eye during his insane growth, thanks to which he crushed all other potential competitors. Systems created over the decades to share computing resources (time-sharing systems, ARPANET, NSFNET) have instead been transformed by users again and again into a means of communication by organizing message boards and e-mails.
In 1995, the National Science Foundation (NSF) successfully removed itself from the management of the network, while maintaining a single unitary Internet, consisting of many heterogeneous, intertwined parts. These were networks owned by various corporations, as well as websites and other services provided by an even wider range of participants - hobbyists, local authorities, small businesses, and so on.
In this puberty period, the image of the Internet was gradually formed. It has become distributed, decentralized and decentralized. Its most ardent supporters argued that its technological structure, which gives the fringes privileges over the center, would spread to new political structures. That it will corrode the foundations of institutional power and allow individuals to communicate directly and make market transactions without intermediaries. Louis Rosetto, editor of the tech-savvy magazine Wired, put it this way:
This new world of ours is characterized by a new global economy, essentially anti-hierarchical and decentralistic, not respecting the borders of states or control by politicians, bureaucrats and traders of all kinds of power. A social consensus is emerging in the global networked consciousness that is creating a new type of democracy, leading this year's bankrupt electoral politics to a dead end. We are witnessing the emergence of a global consciousness that creates a new, spontaneous order.
Libertarian ideas like this were expressed in statements that were so often repeated and reproduced that they became something of the scripture of the Internet. The Gospel of David Clarke ("We deny kings, presidents and voting. We believe in approximate agreement and working code"). Gospel ofJohn Perry Barlow ("The governments of the industrial world, tired giants of flesh and steel, I come to you from cyberspace, the new home of the mind. You are not welcome here. You have no power in our places of gatherings"). The Gospel of John Gilmore ("The network perceives censorship as damage, and builds ways to bypass it").
As I said, these ideas took root even when the Internet was in its adolescence - it was a single interconnected and at the same time heterogeneous system at every level. Over the next fifteen years, the heterogeneity will diminish as the management of the network and its applications is consolidated in the hands of a few key corporations.
As we have seen in the cases of Usenet and FidoNet, even the most anarchic and unplanned networks have a significant tendency to develop a hierarchical structure. Although the technical specifications of the network can be completely democratic, the difference in resources between different nodes and the desire to increase efficiency by reducing the number of nodes separating any two points of the network leads to gravitational collapse. Flat mesh networks with many inter-node links collapse into hierarchical "stars" with central nodes.
Boom: network consolidation
With the explosive growth of the Internet in the second half of the 1990s, financial rivers flowed into Silicon Valley. The business wanted to earn the mountains of gold that would have been unprecedented annual growth in digital traffic. At the time, there was a theory that, due to the global spread of the Internet and the potential for network effects (see Metcalfe's Law ), the first to occupy any sector of online business would dominate it. According to this doctrine, short-term losses, even in the sales of each unit of a product, were irrelevant and even welcomed. It was only growth that mattered, since growth can always be turned into profit in the later stages, when all potential competitors are depleted.
However, this strategy on a long-term scale was successfully implemented by only one surviving player of the dot-com era - Amazon.com.
This approach has spawned a gold rush among investors - what is now called “ lost profits syndrome ” - and has raised a lot of money in dubious ventures like Priceline, Boo and eToys , despite showing no signs of profitability.
However, underneath all this apparent foam of growing application diversity, the deep current of the network infrastructure was headed in the opposite direction - towards consolidation. The boom of the web in the second half of the 1990s was reflected in the boom in the construction of fiber optic networks. All carriers, old and new, wanted their chunk of the exponential growth in traffic expected from the rapid growth of the web. Incumbent telecom operators, exempt by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, have not seized, as one would have hoped, the opportunity to come together in a full-scale competitive battle, keeping profits to a minimum in the interests of their users. Markets may benefit from competition, but firms prefer monopoly. Therefore, RBOC and long distance operators, which split in 1984, reunited as giants,have a huge impact on the market. Bell's southwestern firm gathered Ameritech, Pacific Telesis, BellSouth, and AT&T, taking the name of the latter, the parent company. Bell Atlantic and NYNEX merged, acquired GTE and renamed Verizon. Of all the former RBOCs, only the US West remained independent.
By then, GTE had already bought BBN, which had bought many of the regional networks from NSFNET. As part of the GTE acquisition agreement, Verizon spun off BBNs into a separate company, Genuity, which was subsequently swallowed many times. All of this now belongs to Lumen Technologies - the direct ancestor of the independent US West network.
And while Bell's Southwest Company and Bell Atlantic were assembling parts of AT&T, creating a couple of Frankenstein's monsters, another future giant absorbed various Internet providers that flourished in the first half of the 1990s.In 1983, Bernie Ebbers, who amassed his first fortune as owner of a dozen hotels, co-founded Long Distance Discount Services (LDDS) to compete with others in the recently reopened small and medium-sized business long distance market thanks to the disruption of AT&T. Over the next decade, LDDS acquired many different competitors, reaching the fourth largest toll carrier, behind AT&T, MCI and Sprint. In the early days of the internet boom, it adopted a new name - WorldCom - to announce its arrogant ambition. Acquisitions followed one another at an ever-increasing rate. WorldCom has used bubble-inflated stocks to acquire one major chain after another. In 1996, it bought Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS), which had just acquired the major Internet service provider UUNET itself.This was followed in 1997 by the acquisition of the CompuServe network infrastructure from the H&R block. The company then acquired from AOL ANS, the former NSFNET backbone operator. The largest purchase came in 1998 when WorldCom merged with MCI. After the market collapsed, scandalous proceedings, bankruptcy and prison followed. The fragments of Bernie Ebbers' conglomerate were absorbed by Verizon in 2006.
Cable TV providers have also undergone a shift towards consolidation, although they have historically been more localized than the rest of the telecom business. Mergers and acquisitions in a previously divided market have been able to spawn monsters like Time Warner and Comcast. The latter has become both the largest Internet provider and the largest pay TV company in the United States, not to mention media holdings.
So, by the mid-2000s, the heterogeneous structure of small networks, characteristic of the early Internet in the United States, clustered into several large providers. At the retail level, when broadband replaced telephone switching, most consumers still have access to one or two providers — the local telephone provider and the cable company. At the government level, each sector was dominated by two companies - on the one hand Verizon and AT&T, on the other - Comcast and Time Warner.
Failure: Application Consolidation
Many first generation dot-coms could survive if they were allowed to evolve gradually. However, the gold rush theory rejected everything but exponential growth. Therefore, after the collapse, most of the companies found themselves with huge costs and overcapacity due to excessive investments, as a result of which they were quickly blown away. There was widespread sifting, a lot of straw was sifted out and only a few grains of wheat remained.
In the decade that followed, a much more stable order emerged. Five giant companies have come to dominate the application layer. Two of them survived the dotcom era. Founded in 1998, Google has raised the bar for "search engine" to new heights by extracting ranking information from the structure of the Internet and the tangle of hyperlinks, not just the content of individual pages. Through a series of further innovations and acquisitions, it has made its way into the world of mobile computing, email, video streaming, and, of course, advertising through a dominant position in search. Founded in 1994 to retail books, Amazon developed the best logistics in the world, used it to gain an edge over competitors in cost and speed of delivery, and then expanded to nearly all retail sectors.As a result, she created a toolkit for hosting third-party applications that defined a new profitable cloud computing business.
Two more giants grew up in the era of the personal computer, a decade before the advent of the commercial Internet. Microsoft was one of the first to get involved in the so-called. "Browser wars" of the mid-90s, but more important was its long dominance in the business software market, which continued even after these businesses began to move online. The Apple Computer, relegated to a secondary role in the 1990s by the dominant Windows platform, seemed doomed to gradually decrepit. However, she was revived by the success of the iPod and iTunes, after which she developed the most profitable computing device to date, the iPhone.
The last of the dominant forces, Facebook, became the only survivor of the second wave of the investment boom in the second half of the 2000s. It grew rapidly, taking over college campuses, and then colonizing the whole world, and became the main way people communicate with other people outside the circle of close friends and relatives. Since then, she has bought other communications companies, and has become one of the largest platforms for business marketing, live chat, and of course a huge amount of advertising. The rise of Facebook marked the return of personal digital spaces, comparable to the so-called. Fence gardens from the pre-internet era, such as CompuServe and Prodigy. Facebook has a whole ecosystem of pages for users, community and business, visible and accessible only to those who are signed in.This is in stark contrast to Facebook's predecessor, MySpace, which operated in a slightly redesigned GeoCities 90s web hosting scheme. Then users could customize their own page on the network, and the number of restrictions on access there was very small. Until 2006, only teenagers under 16 could mark their profile as private so that only their friends could access it. All other pages were visible to everyone and open to search.All other pages were visible to everyone and open to search.All other pages were visible to everyone and open to search.
These corporations did not monopolize access to applications the way Verizon, AT&T, and others monopolized package delivery. On the web and other parts of the internet, companies of all kinds and sizes continued to thrive in great numbers. Some of them (like Netflix) use much more internet bandwidth than the Big Five. However, they still control much of the underlying software infrastructure used by other companies of all sizes, as well as regulate people's daily online communications. This is a major shift in how the large-scale structure of the Internet works.
Let's take email as an example. In the 1990s, this basic internet communication platform was largely decentralized. Emails almost always left a server owned by the sender's university or company and went to the server of the recipient's company or university, and then downloaded to the recipient's computer. Today, most email is stored on third-party servers, the largest of which is Google. Similarly, the search for information on the early Internet relied on a distributed system of Gopher servers owned by individuals and organizations, most often universities. Today, most of the search traffic goes through Google, and the majority of products go through Amazon. The last example is the rise of vague "clouds".Once upon a time, most corporate Internet service providers and many single hobbyists, as well as small businesses, hosted their programs on their own computers. But more recently, business-critical applications and even big players like Netflix are running through data centers owned and operated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
The rise of mobile app stores is another example of how power is concentrated in the hands of companies like Google and Apple. In the early years of the Internet, new applications (such as the World Wide Web) were spread by a person or group of people writing programs and letting others download and use them. However, mobile providers wanted to protect their platforms from malicious programs, while receiving a percentage of the sales. They demanded that users go to the stores they supervise in search of applications. It has already become impossible to distribute your programs without the permission of the platform owner (with the exception of a few fairly advanced users who can bypass mobile app stores). The rules for working in such a store are quite extensive - Apple has 24 printed pages. There are such details,as a ban on "overly sexual and pornographic material", "applications that change or disable the functions of standard buttons, such as volume control and mute." They require "your application to run on its own and not require other applications to be installed." All of these requirements sound reasonable as part of corporate efforts to create a user-friendly platform from which they can extract super profits. However, they break the symmetry of the original topology of the Internet, which delegated semantic control over message transmission and interpretation to general-purpose computers at the edge of the network.so that "your application works on its own and does not require the installation of other applications." All of these requirements sound reasonable as part of corporate efforts to create a user-friendly platform from which they can extract super profits. However, they break the symmetry of the original topology of the Internet, which delegated semantic control over message transmission and interpretation to general-purpose computers at the edge of the network.so that "your application works on its own and does not require the installation of other applications." All of these requirements sound reasonable as part of corporate efforts to create a user-friendly platform from which they can extract super profits. However, they break the symmetry of the original topology of the Internet, which delegated semantic control over message transmission and interpretation to general-purpose computers at the edge of the network.located on the outskirts of the network.located on the outskirts of the network.
The reasons for concentrating power in the hands of a small number of application providers are many. One of the interesting features of this process is the role of attackers, pushing users to companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook. The Internet was born in an academic environment, among people with common cultural values (including a mission to spread human knowledge) and a basic level of mutual trust. The apps they created reflected this assumption of trust — for example, anyone could send any number of emails to any address for free. All of this worked well until millions of new users joined the Internet who did not share these values. Inbox folders were flooded with spam. Usenet suffocated from the flood of advertisements and binary pornography. FTP sites,downloads of new free software have turned into minefields of malicious software. Managed islands, controlled by trusted companies with quality spam filters, have become a welcome refuge from the endless greed and malevolence of their online colleagues.
De-Americanization of the Internet
The series of articles on the Internet backbone focused almost entirely on events, people, and organizations from the United States. This way of telling about the history of the Internet before the 1990s has a right to exist. The Internet became an international phenomenon early on (even its predecessor, ARPANET, had international connections), but for most of history, the United States has played a leading role in setting the policies, protocols, and organizational structures of the Internet. From the birth of the electronic computer to the 1990s, most of the innovations in computing and networking were generated by American organizations (sometimes France and Britain wedged into history, and the creation of the web by a British and a Belgian in Switzerland is, of course, a striking exception to the general rule).
However, after 2000, this approach, which is convenient for Americans and other English speakers, has become increasingly difficult to justify. American hegemony on the Internet has faded in several ways. One of the fundamental changes is the loss of the US leadership position in Internet penetration. While they are still quite high in the rankings, they have dropped quite a bit from the top spot they were in 2010. South Korea, the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands all surpass the United States in the number of broadband channels to private homes and their speed. Another symbolic milestone took place in 2009 when the domain issuing organization, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), agreed to leave the US Department of Commerce oversight and by 2016 became an independent international organization.
More importantly, after 2000, other countries, from China and Russia to the European Union, began to build their own legal and technical platforms that shape the Internet according to local customs and realities of political power. Among the significant milestones of this process are the Russian law of 2014, which requires the storage of all data of Russians from online services within the country, and the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), adopted in 2016. Authoritarian countries have established digital boundaries, preventing information inconvenient for the regime from entering the country. The most famous of these examples will be the "Great Firewall of China", installed in 2006. Shielding itself from the rest of the internet, China has created its own internet services, some of which include Bytedance and Tencent.have already reached the international level. The emergence of competitors - be it corporations, states, or something hybrid - have shared power over the Internet without decentralizing it. At least that's not what Rosetto imagined.
Specifically, GDPR has global implications as it requires submission from US giants like Google. California has modeled its consumer privacy law based on this act .
In the 1970s, the end of the post-war US economic boom and the onset of stagflation ended an era of deregulation - a large-scale attempt to unleash market forces on infrastructure sectors that had previously been shielded from them for the sake of stability and equity of access. In the face of the ongoing centralization of power on the Internet and the diminishing role of the United States in control over its structure, it is possible that a similar Cunian crisis associated with the current laissez-faire regime on the Internet will erupt in the states . In the last six months alone, we have seen how: the US government demanded that China sell TikTok; the Department of Justice has called for a review and limitation of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; there was an antitrust lawsuit against Google, the first such lawsuit against a major Internet application provider. Whether these events become temporary or have a long-term impact on the development of the Internet - in any case, the Internet backbone that existed in 1995 is gone. Her youth has long since passed into the category of nostalgic memories, and the Internet may soon have to go through its midlife crisis.