Internet working because Cold War-era pioneers designed it to handle almost anything
Internet working because Cold
War-era pioneers designed it to handle almost anything
By The
Washington Post · Craig Timberg · Apr 07. 2020
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," explained 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, the nation'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% 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 WiFi also has
revealed frustrating limits to those networks.
But so far internet industry
officials report that they've 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 who has briefed some members of the internet's founding
generation about how the company has been handling increased demands.
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 it was broken up in the 1980s, and the similar monopolies in
other countries 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
comparatively anarchic, relying on a few key technological insights and a lot
of faith in collaboration. The result was 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, arrived at through a process for developing expert consensus, 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 as 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, speaking by the
videoconferencing service Zoom. "If we didn't have the internet, we'd be
in an incredibly different place right now. What if this had happened in the
1980s?"
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 8
billion people.
But the lack of a central authority
is key to why the Internet works as well as it does, especially at times of
unforeseen demands.
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, also
speaking by Zoom.
Even more elementally, the Netheads
believed in an innovation called "packet-switching," which broke from
the telephone company's traditional model, called "circuit
switching," that dedicated a line to a single conversation and left it
open until the participants hung up.
The Netheads considered that
terribly wasteful given that any conversation includes pauses or gaps that
could be used to transmit data. Instead, they embraced a model in which all
communications were broken into chunks, called packets, that continuously
shuttled back and forth over shared lines, without pauses.
The computers at either end of these
connections reassembled the packets into whatever they started as - emails,
photos, articles or video - but the network itself didn't know or care what it
was carrying. It just moved the packets around and let the recipient devices
figure out what to do.
That simplicity, almost an
intentional brainlessness at the Internet's most fundamental level, is a key to
its adaptability. As many others have said, it's just a web of highways that
everyone can use for almost any purpose they desire.
Many of the internet's founding
generation have memories of trying to convince various Bellheads that
packet-switching was the inevitable future of telecommunications - cheaper,
faster, easier to scale and vastly more efficient and adaptable.
Those anecdotes all end the same
way, with the telephone company titans of the day essentially treating the
Netheads as precocious but fundamentally misguided children who, some day,
might understand how telecommunications technology really worked. And several
acknowledged they celebrated just a bit when the telephone companies gradually
abandoned old-fashioned circuit-switching for what was called "Voice Over
IP" or VoIP. It was essentially transmitting voice calls over the internet
- using the same technical protocols that Cerf and others had developed decades
earlier.
Leonard Kleinrock, one of three
scientists credited with inventing the concept of packet switching in the
1960s, also was present for the first transmission on the rudimentary network
that would, years later, become the Internet.
That was Oct. 29, 1969, and
Kleinrock was a computer scientist at the University of California at Los
Angeles. A student programmer tried to send the message "login" to a
computer more than 300 miles away, at the Stanford Research Institute, but only
got as far as the first two letters - "L" and "O" - before
the connection crashed.
Retelling the story by phone, over a
line using the internet's packet-switching technology instead of the one long
preferred by the "Bellheads," he recalled his own experience in
trying to convince some phone company executives that he had discovered a
technology that would change the world.
"They said, 'Little boy, go
away,'" Kleinrock said. "So we went away."
And now, Kleinrock, 85 and staying
home to minimize the risk of catching the coronavirus, and enjoying that his
home internet connection is 2,000 times faster than the phone-booth sized
communications device that internet pioneers used in 1969.
"The network," he said,
"has been able to adapt in a beautiful way."
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