At 30 years old, the internet is inescapable
In the week the internet celebrates its 30th birthday, Matt Warman says its influence has never been greater – but you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Pioneers: Vint Cerf, top right, helped invent the internet; Sir Tim Berners-Lee, bottom, built the web on it; and Mark Zuckerberg founded social networking website Facebook
As 1982 drew to a close, it was the sound of Renee and Renato’s Christmas Number One Save Your Love that was setting pulses racing. Even the most enthusiastic of geeks was struggling to get excited by the standardising of the ‘transmission control protocol’. Yet the move to a new system for connecting computers, 30 years ago this week, was to spawn the £1trillion internet industry, change the course of the music business forever, reinvent banking and fundamentally change how we communicate with other people.
The internet, originally short for “internetworking”, had first existed to connect research and academic institutions together, but 1983 saw the moment when individual networks were connected securely and in such a way that the failure of a single component did not bring down the whole net.
What we know today, however, is the web, invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Although it relies on the internet, it is essentially a service that runs over the top of it, connecting billions of different pages via links. The internet is the hardware underneath, from cables that are occasionally inadvertently cut by trawlermen to enormous ‘switches’ that route information from one place to another.
Indeed, the growth of the internet, which is expected to be worth at least £2.5trillion by 2020, continues at breakneck pace. It already connects more devices than there are people on Earth, even though just 2.4billion of the world’s 7billion population is online. As more of them go online, the world 30 years from now is likely to look even more different than 1983 does to us today.
The birth of the internet
Late in the evening of October 29, 1969, a seminal moment took place that laid the foundations of the internet. As described in Gregory Gromov’s “Roads and Crossroads of Internet History”, Leonard Kleinrock, a pioneering computer science professor at the University of California and his small group of graduate students hoped to log on remotely to a Stanford university computer. “They would start by typing ‘login,’ and seeing if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor: "We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at [their lab]," Kleinrock said in an interview: "We typed the L and we asked on the phone, do you see the L? Yes, we see the L, came the response. We typed the O, and we asked do you see the O. Yes, we see the O. Then we typed the G, and the system crashed.”
But as Gromov observes, “a revolution had begun". By 1981, that two-computer network had expanded to 213, known as ARPANET, and linked University College London and a few European locations to what remained a largely American network.
From January 1 1983, America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (Darpa) mandated that all computers on the network used that same “transmission control protocol”, or TCP/IP. That meant that a global, open and easy to connect to network was born.
Weaving the web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s radical improvement to the internet was the idea that pages of information and pictures could also contain links to other pages, allowing users to surf from one to another without hindrance. His decision that this should not be a proprietary service, attracting fees or costs for users, meant the modern, open web we know today could exist.
It also gave birth to vast web servers, housing the information that users wished to access and which now occupy huge warehouses around the world. Indexing that information first took place manually, until Google’s new ‘algorithm’ automated the task of crawling the web. It ranks pages in part by how widely linked they are to others, assuming that links roughly correlate with credibility.
Quickly joined by Facebook, Google remains the pre-eminent web giant largely thanks to the advertising revenue that it generates from showing commercial content next to search results. For the first time, advertising is matched to a user’s specifically known interests.
In 2013, however, the web remains a major source of employment for many, but also a disruptive force that is likely to cause the closure of 5,000 UK shops by March alone. Making money from services that have huge numbers of users, from Instagram to Snapchat, remains a huge challenge.
A new internet
Three trends will shape the future of the internet: as more people in more countries get online, it is likely to connect the world in a way that has not yet been fully understood. Vint Cerf, of the original pioneers of the internet, even wants to see it sent into space, and it’s become a truism to say that developing nations will skip many of the phases that Europe and America went through, including landline phones. More machines, too, will start to use the web, meaning that your fridge, in a long-promised new guise, will finally be able to order food when you’ve nearly run out. This machine-to-machine communication is already here, with water sensors in flower pots that trigger automatic waterers, but its scale will become much greater.
Finally, the growth of personal, individual presence online, will see us all targeted for adverts and services much more than we are currently. The ‘social graph’, by which Facebook knows our connections to other people and our interests as well, is only the beginning.
Some worry that privacy concerns or economic changes mean the web is a utility upon which we are now overly reliant. But in 2012, at least, consumers cleary judged that the benefits, from banking to gaming and from education to entertainment, remained far greater than the risks.
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