KEEPING THE WORLD CONNECTED
Cold War era pioneers designed the internet to continue operating during a Soviet nuclear attack
Coronavirus knocked down — at least for a time — internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, who offers this reflection on the experience: “I don’t recommend it ... It’s very debilitating.”
But Cerf, 76 and now recovering in his Northern Virginia home, has better news to report about the computer network he and others spent much of their lives creating. Despite some problems, the internet overall is handling unprecedented surges of demand as it helps keep a fractured world connected at a time of global catastrophe.
“This basic architecture is 50 years old, and everyone is online,” Cerf noted in a video interview over Google Hangouts, with a mix of triumph and wonder in his voice.
“And the thing is not collapsing.” The internet, born as a Pentagon project during some of the chillier years of the Cold War, has taken such a central role in 21st century civilian society, culture and business that few pause any longer to appreciate its wonders — except perhaps, as in the past few weeks, when it becomes even more central to our lives.
Many facets of human life — work, school, banking, shopping, flirting, live music, government services, chats with friends, calls to aging parents — have moved online in this era of social distancing, all without breaking the network. It has groaned here and there, as anyone who has struggled through a glitchy video conference knows, but it has not failed.
“Resiliency and redundancy are very much a part of the internet design,” said Cerf, whose passion for touting the wonders of computer networking prompted Google in 2005 to name him its Chief Internet Evangelist, a title he still holds.
Comcast, America’s largest source of residential internet serving more than 26 million homes, reports that peak traffic was up by nearly one third in March, with some areas reaching as high as 60 per cent above normal.
Demand for online voice, video and VPN connections — all staples of remote work — have surged, and peak usage hours have shifted from evenings, when people typically stream video for entertainment, to daytime work hours.
Concerns about such shifting demands prompted European officials to request downgrades in video streaming quality from major services such as Netflix and YouTube, and there have been some localized internet outages and other problems, including the breakage of a key transmission cable running down the West coast of Africa — an incident with no connection to the coronavirus pandemic.
Heavier use of home Wi-Fi also has revealed frustrating limits to those networks.
But so far, internet industry officials report they have been able to manage the shifting loads and surges. To a substantial extent, the network has managed them automatically because its underlying protocols adapt to shifting conditions, working around trouble spots to find more efficient routes for data transmissions, and managing glitches in a way that doesn’t break connections entirely.
Some credit goes to Comcast, Google and the other giant, well-resourced corporations essential to the internet’s operation today.
But perhaps even more goes to the seminal engineers and scientists like Cerf, who for decades worked to create a particular kind of global network — open, efficient, resilient and highly interoperable so anyone could join and nobody needed to be in charge.
“They’re deservedly taking a bit of a moment for a high-five right now,” said Jason Livingood, a Comcast vice-president.
Cerf was a driving force in developing key internet protocols in the 1970s while working for Stanford University, and later, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which provided key early research funding but ultimately relinquished control of the network it spawned.
He also was among a gang of self-described “Netheads” who led an insurgency against the dominant forces in telecommunications at the time, dubbed the “Bellheads” for their loyalty to the Bell Telephone Company and its legacy technologies.
Bell, which dominated U.S. telephone service until the 1980s, wanted to connect computers through a system much like their lucrative telephone systems, with fixed networks of connections run by central entities that could make all of the major technological decisions, control access and charge whatever the market — or government regulators — would allow.
The vision of the Netheads was anarchy by comparison, a network — or really, a network of networks — with no chief executive, no police, no taxman and no laws.
In their place were technical protocols that offered anyone access to the digital world, from any properly configured device. Their numbers, once measured in the dozens, now rank in the tens of billions, including phones, televisions, cars, dams, drones, satellites, thermometers, garbage cans, refrigerators, watches and so much more.
This Netheads’ idea of a globe-spanning network that no single company or government controlled goes a long way toward explaining why an Indonesian shopkeeper with a phone made in China can log onto an American social network to chat — face to face and almost instantaneously — with her friend in Nigeria.
That capability still exists, even in a time when much of the world has banned or restricted international travel.
“You’re seeing a success story right now,” said David Clark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who worked on early internet protocols.
“If we didn’t have the internet, we would be in an incredibly different place right now.”
Such a system carries a notable cost in terms of security and privacy, a fact the world rediscovers every time there’s a major data breach, ransomware attack or controversy over the amount of information governments and private companies collect about anyone who’s online — a category that includes more than half of the world’s almost eight billion people.
But the lack of a central authority is key to why the internet works as well as it does.
Some of the early internet architects — Cerf among them, from his position at the Pentagon — were determined to design a system that could continue operating through almost anything, including a nuclear attack from the Soviets.
That’s one reason the system doesn’t have any preferred path from Point A to Point B. It continuously calculates and recalculates the best route, and if something in the middle fails, the computers that calculate transmission paths find new routes — without having to ask anyone’s permission to do so.
Steve Crocker, a networking pioneer like Cerf, compared this quality to that of a sponge, an organism whose functions are so widely distributed that breaking one part does not typically cause the entire organism to die.
“You can do damage to a portion of it, and the rest of it just lumbers forward,” Crocker said, speaking by Zoom.
You’re seeing a success story right now. If we didn’t have the internet, we would be in an incredibly different place right now.