{"id":44463,"date":"2019-03-13T19:34:39","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T00:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=44463"},"modified":"2019-03-13T19:34:41","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T00:34:41","slug":"the-death-of-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=44463","title":{"rendered":"The Death of the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Death of the Internet<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Intended to be open, free, and decentralized, it’s now dominated by a handful of companies that control what we see and what we can say.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Credit: Frederic Legrand \u2013 COMEO \/ Shutterstock.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The internet was meant to be open, free, and decentralized, but today it is controlled by a few companies with grave consequences for society and the economy. The internet has become the opposite of what it was intended to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early 1960s, Paul Baran was an engineer at the RAND Corporation when he began thinking about the need for a communications network that could withstand a nuclear strike. RAND was contracted by the Pentagon to create a system that could continue operating even if parts of it were destroyed by an atomic blast. It was supposed to be the ultimate decentralized system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baran went on to publish a paper in 1964 titled \u201cOn Distributed Communications,<\/a>\u201d which was influential in establishing the concepts behind the architecture of the internet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn put these concepts into practice at the Department of Defense\u2019s Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s, and created the communication methods that make the internet possible. The principles of freedom and openness were at the heart of the design\u2014packet switching<\/a> made the system robust in the face of nuclear attacks and Internet Protocol<\/a> allowed for open interconnection.Advertisement<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years later, Cerf said<\/a>, \u201cThe beauty of the internet is that it\u2019s not controlled by any one group.\u201d In his view, \u201cthis model has not only made the internet very open\u2014a testbed for innovation by anyone, anywhere\u2014it\u2019s also prevented vested interests from taking control.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The principle of decentralization went directly against the business models of technology giants like AT&T and IBM. Until AT&T\u2019s monopoly was broken up in the early 1980s, communications were extremely centralized and traveled through dedicated, point-to-point channels. The use of third-party devices on the network was prohibited. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Death of the Internet Intended to be open, free, and decentralized, it’s now dominated by a handful of companies that control what we see and what we can say. Credit: Frederic Legrand \u2013 COMEO \/ Shutterstock.com The internet was meant to be open, free, and decentralized, but today it is controlled by a few companies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2299,5247,24662,12557,15008,16732],"class_list":["post-44463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-control","tag-darpa","tag-internt","tag-jonathan-tepper","tag-rand-corporation","tag-the-american-conservative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44464,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44463\/revisions\/44464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}