What is Internet? What is its most important feature?
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing.
The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States federal government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks. The primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s marks the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, and generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network. Although the Internet was widely used by academia since the 1980s, the commercializationincorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life.
Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the developing world. In the 20 years since 1995, Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for the period of one year, to over one third of the world population. Most traditional communications media, including telephony, radio, television, paper mail and newspapers are being reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephony, Internet television music, digital newspapers, and video streaming websites. Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators. The entertainment industry was initially the fastest growing segment on the Internet. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Online shopping has grown exponentially both for major retailers and small businesses and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their "bricks and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.
|
|
|
The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.
What is the most important feature of the Internet? Dis-intermediation!
When asked what I believe is the most important feature of the Internet, I boil it down to one thing: dis-intermediation.
One often discussed feature is open vendor-neutral standards which allow software from any number of for-profit or non-profit projects to interoperate with each other. What makes this feature important is the fact that there is no single vendor or other organization that controls this network or acts as an intermediary between senders (producers, creators, publishers, etc) and receivers (audiences, consumers, etc) in the communication. The networks before the Internet were all proprietary and the individual components were created by the same company.
One of the central design principles of TCP/IP is the end-to-end principlewhere you had a dumb network with smart endpoints. This is what allowed there to be innovation at these endpoints that did not require the permission of the providers of the underlying network in order to be created. Whether it was Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) to exchange email or Hyper-Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) to exchange web-pages, these were all innovations that did not require changes to the underlying network, or permission from any intermediary. You only needed to have agreement between two peers at the edges of the network that they were going to speak a specific protocol. This is another form of dis-intermediation
|
|
|
I believe the most important forward-looking policy direction we as Canadians can take is to support dis-intermediation, allowing Canadians to talk directly with other Canadians without having intermediaries with their own special interests able to control this communication. I believe we need Government to move away from focusing attention on highly intermediated broadcast and broadcast-like systems, and put more energy into supporting and promoting dis-intermediated communications networks like those facilitated by the Internet.
When I look at the type of changes to public policy that most upset me, it is those that seek to re-intermediate communications. When I look at the recent Heritage Interim Report on copyright I see the imposition of two types of harmful re-intermediation: creating government protected technology intermediaries in the form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), and government created business intermediaries in the form of statutory or extended licenses.
While DRM is advertised as a method for copyright holders to enforce their copyright license agreements, it is really a method to impose a new type of intermediary in the communication between creators and their audiences. It is an attempt to duplicate over Internet wiring a broadcast-style configuration where creators can only communicate with audiences through a powerful intermediary. While this can be claimed to make copyright enforcement easier as these intermediaries do control these communications channels, you also have the huge cost of having powerful intermediaries able to dictate cultural policy.
Дата добавления: 2018-06-01; просмотров: 608; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!