Networks in Reverse
From the Interplanetary Internet via the ARPANET to the Last
Pre-Internet Moment
Vinton G. Cerf, U.S. Internet pioneer, Google's Chief Internet
Evangelist and creator of the Interplanetary Internet, was pacing around
his lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Concerned
that the Interplanetary Internet had been incurring large delays and
errors in communication due to the increasing distances involved, he
scratched at his grey beard as he read the latest bulletin from The
Daily Tech on the screen of his console.
'NASA Plans Hack-proof "Interplanetary Internet" for Use in Mars,
Moon Missions. Architectures should be cost effective, extensible and
sustainable in a flat and/or decreasing budget environment'
http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Plans+Hackproof+Interplanetary+Internet+for+Use+in+Mars+
Moon+Missions/article30102.htm
Over the following months signal degradation set in across the IPN
network and as a result the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) held a conference to resolve the issue. The following day
they released the news that they were pulling funding from the IPN project.
Subsequently all space probes and satellites which had served as Net
gateways, conveying data packets to and from Earth and among themselves
were retasked. Vint Cerf's dream of a collaborative, stable backbone of
satellites serving as IPN's nucleus was eradicated.
With funding freed up from interplanetary communications, DARPA now had
more than adequate finance for its DARWARS military simulation game
training project. In their own words: "Continuous online, mission-level
training. Cognitive training systems that include elements of
human-tutor interactions and the emotional involvement of computer games
coupled with the feedback of Combat Training Center learning. Using the
example of commercial, persistent, massive multiplayer online games, the
program will link these new training approaches with existing Service
and Joint training systems into a self-sustaining architecture, allowing
continuous on-demand training anywhere, anytime, for everyone."
DARWARS' primary architecture developer was the military subcontractor
Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) Technologies, who had led a wide range of
research and development projects including the U.S. military's
'Boomerang' mobile shooter detection system; quantum information
processing; 'Natural Communication with Avatars Through Speech and
Gesture' technology; and the standardisation effort for Internet
security architecture (IPsec).
After several years in operation and many round table discussions
DARWARS was decommissioned by the US Government. The decision had no
tangible effect on the average person in the street. The territorial
network for civilians was still the Intercloud, the interconnected
global Cloud of Clouds, an extension of the Internet network of
networks, one global interconnected database. Housed in multiple data
warehouses across the globe the Intercloud facilitated access to all
'available' data, no matter which Cloud corporation you happened to
subscribe to for your data storage, network communications and apps.
Led by a broad coalition of industry practitioners, corporations,
associations and other key stakeholders, including the U.S. Department
of Defense, eBay, Google, Amazon and assorted telephone companies,
security analytics professionals and arms manufacturers, the concept of
a Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) was born at the Information Systems
Security Association (ISSA) CISO Forum in Las Vegas. The CSA was a
non-profit organisation formed to promote the use of best practices for
providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and provide
education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms
of computing.
When, despite best efforts, secure transmission between individual data
warehouses became increasingly problematic, the architectures of the
Cloud and the Intercloud were gradually abandoned. For the time being,
however, Internet governance bodies remained in place.
Governance that shaped uses of the Internet had been overseen by
several, for the most part, U.S. controlled entities. United Nations
World Summits on the Information Society were held where the U.S.
Department of Commerce had made it clear that it intended to retain
control of the Internet's root servers indefinitely.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was a
U.S. non-profit corporation founded by Jon Postel in California which
controlled and managed the Internet's Infrastructure. Vinton Cerf was on
board ICANN for the first decade.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) was the body that oversaw
global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root
zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other
Internet Protocol-related symbols and numbers. IANA was operated by
ICANN. Prior to the establishment of ICANN for this purpose, IANA was
administered primarily by Jon Postel at the Information Sciences
Institute of the University of Southern California, under a contract
USC/ISI had with the United States Department of Defense, until ICANN
was created to assume the responsibility under a United States
Department of Commerce contract.
The Internet Society (ISOC) was an international, non-profit
organization founded to provide direction in Internet related standards,
education, and policy. It stated that its mission was "to assure the
open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of
all people throughout the world". Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Lyman Chapin
released a document, announcing ISOC, which explained the rationale for
establishing the Internet Society. ISOC had offices near Washington, DC,
USA, and in Geneva, Switzerland. It had a membership base comprising
more than 80 organisational and more than 28,000 individual members.
Members also formed "chapters" based on either common geographical
location or special interests. There were more than 90 chapters around
the world.
ISOC conducted a great range of activities under three main categories,
namely standards, public policy, and education. Under the standards
category, ISOC supported and promoted the work of the standards settings
bodies for which it was the organisational home: the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB),
the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), and the Internet
Research Task Force (IRTF). ISOC also sought to promote understanding
and appreciation of the Internet model of open, transparent processes
and consensus-based decision making.
One of the most powerful commercial online players, Google Inc., the
American multinational public corporation, was heavily invested in
Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. After
many years of successful enterprise, a series of failed lawsuits caused
Google to descend slowly into liquidation. One by one Google
systematically scaled down its operations, closing its acquisitions,
internal sectors and online applications formerly known as Google Earth,
Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Street View, Google Books, its video
-sharing site YouTube, Google files on worldwide Genetic data, and
finally its algorithmic personally targeted advertising services for
third party websites. All other online corporations and multinationals
eventually followed suit. The satellite which had provided Google with
high-resolution imagery for Google Earth was returned to Vandenberg Air
Force Base on the same day as Google deleted the entire known Web from
its database. The company's unofficial slogan, coined by Google engineer
Paul Buchheit, "Don't be evil" was relegated to history books, chipped
mugs and T shirts.
As a consequence of this cyber cataclysm, all corporate owned social and
professional networking sites, e.g. Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, MySpace,
LinkedIn, Nexopia, Bebo, Hyves, StudiVZ, iWiW, Tuenti, Tagged, XING,
Badoo, Skyrock, Orkut and Hi5, Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Wretch,
Cyworld, simultaneously shut down and millions of gigabytes of user data
became dead code in abandoned data warehouses.
The Googleplex site at Mountain View, California slowly fell into
disrepair, developing the look of an ex worldÕs fair ground and
inevitably becoming a tourist attraction which was soon served by a
retro-hippy bus tour company from San Francisco. Nearby the National
Science Foundation (NSF), together with DARPA and NASA, were winding up
the Digital Library Initiative, refusing a grant application to Stanford
University, with the result that two graduate students, Larry Page and
Sergey Brin abandoned developing a search engine using the links between
Web pages as a ranking method.
Due to closure of all web based economies and loss of a cooperative
backdoor entry for Governments and the CIA, the U.S. National Security
Agency's PRISM, TIA and other such data surveillance projects were
abandoned, the U.S. Cyber Command program was decommissioned and funds
were no longer available for the numerous Internet governance bodies.
What had become known as Net War or Info War and its associated
terrorist and anonymous networks, networked revolution, the activities
of civil society activists and hacktivists gradually ceased to function.
Likewise, swarming attacks, info leaking, attacks on financial,
transport, power and food supply systems, spying on and subversion of
industrial systems, awareness raising, evasion of government censors and
monitors, collective action organising and decentralised network
structures began to dwindle to a halt in the digital realm.
Online grassroots networks disappeared one after the other. Nettime, a
discussion mailing list for networked cultures, politics and tactics,
was abolished by Geert Lovink; The WELL was abandoned by Stewart Brand
and Larry Brilliant, and the so called 'new media' festivals and
conferences which had sought, encouraged and represented the engagement
of artists, writers and theorists in new technologies and the politics
of the Net, became redundant. Evangelical Net communities living in
disparate and often marginalised parts of the globe, who had come
together through listservs and euphoric fantasies for the potential of
an Internet based global change for the better, for empowerment and
border free communication for the politically disenfranchised and the
war torn, became disillusioned.
Pretty soon Vint Cerf closed down the Internet Society, and the US
National Science Foundation closed the Internet to commercial use.
Months later the text based virtual space 'Lambdamoo' finally went
offline and The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a
U.S. Department of Defense funded project which had pioneered the early
Internet, resumed its operations.
At CERN in Geneva Tim Berners Lee disabled communications between all
HTTP clients and servers via the Internet and dismantled the World Wide Web.
At around the same time Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris and Craig Partridge
redesigned the Domain Name System (DNS), removing all domain names
ending in .edu .gov .com .mil .org .net and .int.
The DCA combined MILNET with ARPANET where at the time there were 68
nodes on ARPANET, and 45 on MILNET, the military network and Vint Cerf
replaced Barry Leiner at DARPA managing the Internet.
Leonard Kleinrock held the key mathematical background to packet
switching and an ARPANET network was re-established between KleinrockÕs
lab at UCLA and Douglas EngelbartÕs lab at SRI and the initial 4-node
network was reconnected with UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.
Vinton G. Cerf went on to work in Kleinrock's data packet networking
group at UCLA that connected the first 2 nodes of ARPANET, then went
back to work at IBM before returning to Stanford.
Robert Elliot Kahn, who had invented Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
and Internet Protocol (IP) with Vint Cerf and written, 'Host to IMP
Spec. 1822' at BBN which detailed the interface between ARPANET host
computers and the Interface Message Processors, returned via MIT to his
position at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, AT&T.
Lawrence Roberts, the first Information Processing Technologies Office
(IPTO) chief scientist, began design of ARPANET, upon becoming Director
of IPTO.
Robert W. Taylor who had conceived of and directed funding for ARPANET
and who with J. C. R. Licklider had written, 'The Computer as a
Communication Device', the paper which led to the creation of ARPANET,
returned from his new role as Director of IPTO at ARPA to work for NASA.
Taylor decided to leave ARPA after congress pushed for it to focus its
work towards advancing military missions during the Vietnam War, because
his mission was for the technology to be available to all.
Ivan Sutherland took over as head of IPTO at ARPA and was shortly
replaced by J. C. R. Licklider. Licklider, known for his work in
Artificial Intelligence and cybernetics, dissuaded Sutherland, Taylor
and Roberts from developing the Internet.
Suzanne Treister 2013
Published in: 'Networks', Edited by Lars Bang Larsen, Whitechapel
Documents of Contemporary Art, published by MIT Press 2014
--------------------------------
Suzanne Treister
http://www.suzannetreister.net/
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