Happy Birthday, WWW
A friend sent me an article containing 25 surprizing things about the web in celebration of its 25th birthday, which was launched on a CERN server in 1991. I'm going to quote the first item, which is actually about the Internet, in full because the point it makes is so important.
"The thing that is most extraordinary about the internet is the way it enables permissionless innovation. This stems from two epoch-making design decisions made by its creators in the early 1970s: that there would be no central ownership or control; and that the network would not be optimised for any particular application: all it would do is take in data-packets from an application at one end, and do its best to deliver those packets to their destination.
It was entirely agnostic about the contents of those packets. If you had an idea for an application that could be realised using data-packets (and were smart enough to write the necessary software) then the network would do it for you with no questions asked. This had the effect of dramatically lowering the bar for innovation, and it resulted in an explosion of creativity.
What the designers of the internet created, in effect, was a global machine for springing surprises. The web was the first really big surprise and it came from an individual – Tim Berners-Lee – who, with a small group of helpers, wrote the necessary software and designed the protocols needed to implement the idea. And then he launched it on the world by putting it on the Cern internet server in 1991, without having to ask anybody's permission."
Jim Naughton
The Observer, March 8, 2014
Needless to say, one of the big arguments about the Internet today is over control of it. The US, its founding nation, has control of the domain names, and to a very limited extent that provides some control over what goes where. But other than that, it's the wild west as far as what the Internet provides. And while you may pay for a host (the place where the files that create your website, blog post, or Instagram photo exist), and for the ownership of your domain name, you don't pay anything to get on the freeway and let the traffic come, or not come, to your door.
But the next thing to make clear is this: the Internet is not the World Wide Web.
The Internet sprang from the US Department of Defense, and its ARPANET, which was the system of decentralized data packet sharing. The idea was that if information could be broken down into small bit tagged with a code about reassembling them, and then passed along from computer to computer on a random pathway, nobody - until that data reached its destination - would have control of or access to that data. If the data couldn't travel from A-B-C, it would travel from D-J-B as necessary, each letter representing a computer. So if any one computer went offline, the data would simply head off to another computer which was still online.
In spite of its being a Department of Defense innovation that went all the way back to the 50s in its initial stages, the Internet - as it eventually became known - was open to innovation. And it was that open platform that allowed Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web, a system of interlinked hypertext documents which are accessed by the Internet.
"The thing that is most extraordinary about the internet is the way it enables permissionless innovation. This stems from two epoch-making design decisions made by its creators in the early 1970s: that there would be no central ownership or control; and that the network would not be optimised for any particular application: all it would do is take in data-packets from an application at one end, and do its best to deliver those packets to their destination.
It was entirely agnostic about the contents of those packets. If you had an idea for an application that could be realised using data-packets (and were smart enough to write the necessary software) then the network would do it for you with no questions asked. This had the effect of dramatically lowering the bar for innovation, and it resulted in an explosion of creativity.
What the designers of the internet created, in effect, was a global machine for springing surprises. The web was the first really big surprise and it came from an individual – Tim Berners-Lee – who, with a small group of helpers, wrote the necessary software and designed the protocols needed to implement the idea. And then he launched it on the world by putting it on the Cern internet server in 1991, without having to ask anybody's permission."
Jim Naughton
The Observer, March 8, 2014
Needless to say, one of the big arguments about the Internet today is over control of it. The US, its founding nation, has control of the domain names, and to a very limited extent that provides some control over what goes where. But other than that, it's the wild west as far as what the Internet provides. And while you may pay for a host (the place where the files that create your website, blog post, or Instagram photo exist), and for the ownership of your domain name, you don't pay anything to get on the freeway and let the traffic come, or not come, to your door.
But the next thing to make clear is this: the Internet is not the World Wide Web.
The Internet sprang from the US Department of Defense, and its ARPANET, which was the system of decentralized data packet sharing. The idea was that if information could be broken down into small bit tagged with a code about reassembling them, and then passed along from computer to computer on a random pathway, nobody - until that data reached its destination - would have control of or access to that data. If the data couldn't travel from A-B-C, it would travel from D-J-B as necessary, each letter representing a computer. So if any one computer went offline, the data would simply head off to another computer which was still online.
In spite of its being a Department of Defense innovation that went all the way back to the 50s in its initial stages, the Internet - as it eventually became known - was open to innovation. And it was that open platform that allowed Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web, a system of interlinked hypertext documents which are accessed by the Internet.
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