Today in class you will be talking about the history and future of the Internet. I encourage everyone to consider the history of the Internet further back than its “birth” as ARPAnet in the late 1960s – even back to the beginning of the first electronic communications network, the telegraph, nearly 100 years earlier. I just found this very well-researched book at my local library – History of the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present, by Christos Moschovitis, published in 1999. It doesn’t really focus on the telegraph network, instead outlining a chronology of technical developments in computers which led to the personal computer. But still, if you’re interested in this topic, it’s a great starting point.
As for the current state and near future of the Internet, an article from New Scientist magazine published this past week, entitled “Interview: Over the internet border” is available in the Sakai site and provides a nice perspective on the Internet as a collection of “internets” rather than “one common internet”. The impact of the next billion users coming from developing nations such as China, India, and Russia is hard to guess at, but any notion of English as a global language (of the internet) is sure to fall. In fact, just several months ago (in 2006) there were major concerns when China threatened to implement its own DNS (Domain Name System), which would compete with the American-controlled ARIN/RIPE registries which dole out .com, .net, .org and other web site suffixes. The concerns were posed as “splitting the ‘net in two”, which is somewhat of an exaggeration if you agree that the idea of a unified Internet has always been a myth. Also, at a United Nations conference last year, many of the smaller (in size) nations of the world complained of the American dominance over the backbone of the Internet, an accusation which the United States responded to by claiming no other organization or entity could maintain it equitably and “free”.
So that just provides a very recent history of the trajectory that Internet development is on, and the pace of change for the forseeable future will only increase. As for the future further out, talking about 4g and Web 3.0, I hope to get to those in my next post.
