by Cory Barker
The Centrifugal Development of the Internet
Surprisingly, there are only a few book-length studies of the development of the Internet. Nevertheless, most try to focus on one aspect of the Internet’s development and not the whole history. The reason for the lack of comprehensive histories is most likely the fact that to write a history of the Internet one must take on a subject that has a definite history but one that changes by the minute. The moment one stops writing such a book, it is automatically out of date. As history’s institutional goal is to show implications of events, it is still somewhat difficult to determine just how profoundly the Internet is affecting our lives and what extent it will change them in just a few years. However, an aspect of the development of the Internet that appears in most of these histories is the decentralizing ethic of the engineers and developers who built the Internet to be a centrifugal force in modern life. Ryan’s history of the Internet explains the importance of this development model as putting “power in the hands of the individual, power to challenge even the state, to compete for markets across the globe, to demand and create new types of media, to subvert a society—or to elect a president.”8 The potential influence of one technology to radically alter society and politics in these ways (unimaginable, perhaps, even to the early developers of the Internet) is an understood part of daily life now. But the Internet’s immense influence and power is just now becoming one of the most contested sites of rights, freedom of access, and questions of who should control information—a development that the early Internet’s often apolitical engineers would find troubling or at least strange. In the case of Netflix and Comcast, the FCC’s ruling to keep the Internet neutral to user access represents one of the first instances that the Internet itself, and not the application of the Internet, is coming under regulatory scrutiny—scrutiny that may change the very structure of how the Internet operates. While the Internet is a centrifugal, user-driven, and open collection of technologies, Ryan says there will be battles and growing pains as the world adjusts to “the new global commons, a political and media system in flux.”9 Those who can compete for “the future of competitive creativity” define this system.10
The Internet, as Ryan outlines, was developed in the years just after World War II, a time of tension between the United States and Soviet Union when President Harry S. Truman’s strategy advisors were seeking out forms of rapid communication that could transfer unprecedented amounts of information from node to node on existing network connections. The primary concern of his advisors was the communication between sites that housed nukes. In the event of the threat of attack by the Soviet Union, communication between the sites and central command would be crucial, as the failure to inform nuke controllers of a false alarm could lead to nuclear war. His advisors suggested a system that had no central hub. If, during an attack, a central communication hub were destroyed, remote nuke operators would be left without any direction from central command. Their suggested system, first sketched out by Paul Baran of RAND (a U.S. think tank), proposed a system based on the structure of the human brain. His alternative to the existing analog communications system was “a centrifugal distribution of control points: a distributed network that had no vulnerable central point and could rely on redundancy.”11 Baran’s goal was to increase communication networks in order to avoid war—not to make it easier to wage.12
Ryan’s goal in outlining the history of the Internet in this way is to show that the centrifugal principles that the structure on which the Internet was built still guide its protocols and software today. Thus engineers who built the technologies that would eventually come together to become the Internet put power not in any central point but responsibility at the nodal level so that each node became as equal as any other. Baran’s concept, and eventually the Internet, became a user-to-user rather than center-to-center communications model. The concept at the time was radical, and when approached by the Air Force to test out Baran’s system AT&T dismissed it outright.13 After AT&T’s refusal to test Baran’s idea (because of its failure of imagination), the project was shelved until a team could be assembled that had an open vision of what networks could become. As seen in a question Baran posed at the end of a 1962 memo on distributed communication networks, the vision for such a system was about much more than a nuclear-proof network. Baran asked, “Is it now time to start thinking about a new and possibly non-existent public utility, a common user digital data plant designed specifically for the transmission of digital data among a large set of subscribers?”14
The history of the precursor to the Internet, ARPANET (the network developed by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency), has been detailed Ryan’s work, and by others. Here, though, I want to point to a few of the features in the development of ARPANET that led to its openness and decentralized structure. First, ARPA had a culture in its laboratories of liberality with research funding and little constraint on needing any application to the technologies its researchers developed. Secondly, the early protocols (codes that enable machines on networks to communicate with each other) that came to define the Internet were informal and run by consensus. Steve Crocker developed the first set of protocols just a year out of his undergraduate studies at UCLA. He developed them, he later recalled, in the bathroom so as not to disturb the sleep of other ARPA developers with whom he was sharing an apartment. These protocols would come to define the way machines communicate over the Internet for the next half-century.15 In a memo sent shortly after Crocker wrote the first protocols, he set the open tone for their future development. The memo stated, “Closely related to keeping the technical design open was keeping the social process around the design open as well. Anyone was welcome to join the party.”16
Even with the government’s interventions and funding in developing the infrastructure of the Internet and funding large portions of the research that went into it, the engineers were able to keep the culture of the Internet one of openness. Their driving virtue was that of universal access. Arguably, this openness and access eventually drove down the prices of machines that connect to it. The government as well as the corporations that would grow out of these early developments relied on collaboration with generally leftist engineers and designers as well as the full-fledged techno-anarchists with activist agendas. Such collaboration brought forth social computing and has become the primary use of the Internet decades later. One of the major motivations for early engineers to socialize computers over a network was so gamers could connect with each other easily. As ARPA made deals to expand its network to nodes with specific interests, such as CSNET (for the Computer Science Network), director Robert Kahn ensured that subscribers to the service “would not be charged for traffic.” This set a new tone for openness and allowed labs and individuals with limited funds to connect over existing telephone systems.17
Back to a Center: Netflix and the Question of an Open Internet
Today we speak of an open Internet, one that does not discriminate against the user that produces or consumes content online. However, the meaning of “open” is shifting and needs some grounding in other, more familiar ideas that we have debated for centuries. There are two assumptions whose cultural etymologies can help us think through the issue of net neutrality and Netflix’s role as an antipodal moment in the development of the Internet. The first is the assumption about equality on which U.S. society and most European countries have based policy in the past half-century. Equality, the lack of which many commentators have turned to in the past decade, is contentious in a culture where some hierarchies are thought to be legitimate. The Internet, even in its short history, has provided a destabilizing mechanism whereby anyone with minimal skill can challenge the digital architecture of even the seemingly most secure organizations. In 2014, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organizer of the Internet’s domain name system, was hacked by employees who were tricked into opening seemingly legitimate emails full of malware.18 P
ressure from the Occupy movement as well as Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s focus on consumer protectionism has forced political rhetoric to take a populist turn. Bernie Sanders’s meteoric rise in the 2016 Democratic primary is clear evidence of this shift. Hillary Clinton has also had to give a nod to populism with attempts to distance herself from Wall Street, and even the Republican candidates in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election vied to be seen as the most populist candidate. The reality is that current policy directly divides income levels more than ever in the United States.
Thomas Piketty, in his authoritative study of economic inequality in the United States and Europe in the past 15 years, describes some of the reasons for the emergence of these two worlds based solely on income. There are important catalysts for their emergence that were also catalysts for the Internet’s creation. In the wake of World War II, the United States and their allies were left to carve out a good part of the world as they saw fit. The world that emerged was one where power was centralized and contracts for development handed out to the highest bidder.19 However, through its early developments through the end of the 1990s the Internet remained relatively free of government regulation. Attempts to regulate pornography and graphic images such as the Communications Decency Act of 1996 have been systematically struck down by the Supreme Court.20 Parts of the act dealing with the production and possession of child pornography were eventually made into law. However, aside from the issue of child pornography, Congress largely avoids bills that attempt to regulate providers or users of Internet content. Congress has especially avoided the ways in which content is provided or distributed, which makes its recent approach to net neutrality a major shift in viewpoint and policy.
The second assumption or question that is helpful here is the question of what can truly be called “public” in the United States, and the extended question of what constitutes participation in any given public entity. The question of the Internet as a public good/right is what many see as at stake in the net neutrality case. The rise of a public good is invariably associated with the rise of the modern state. The tension between what is done in the public’s name and with the public’s approval is ongoing. The problem also hinges on the question of who is entitled to be a member of the public.21 Narrowing this concept down to what constitutes a “public good” is somewhat difficult because the term is so often used inaccurately. Economist Paul A. Samuelson is credited with introducing the idea of a public good. By his description, a public good is a good whose consumption by one group does not reduce its availability to another group. Examples of public goods include fresh air, knowledge, national security, and street lighting.22 Fresh water, as demonstrated by California’s water “wars,” is clearly not a public good under Samuelson’s definition. Water is a utility. Public goods are frequently confused with a sense of “the public good”—something that benefits society broadly. One is a thing and the other a description. However, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, caused by state officials knowingly allowing Flint residents to drink lead-contaminated water and leaving them without a clean water source for the foreseeable future, has started national conversation the need to see public goods and utilities as things that benefit societies broadly. As follow-up reporting on the crisis has broadened, we now know Flint, Michigan, is far from the only city with a seriously compromised water source.23 Broad and increasing access to high-speed Internet currently fits into both of these categories. Internet access is a good whose use by one group does not affect its availability for another. For all its downfalls, most would agree the Internet has made profoundly good changes for the broader public. Here the net neutrality debate becomes somewhat more complex. The backers of a multiple-tiered Internet seek to move Internet access out of the first category, essentially arguing the Internet is nice to have but cannot continue as a good equally available to all.
The security of the public good is widely considered to be the primary goal of the state. This assumption has led to the idea in popular thought as well as in political rhetoric that the state acts on behalf of the people. The flow of information in a digitally networked society is crucial to the continuation of that society as well as the ability of its members to participate in the natural flow of networks. By the basic definition of the phrase, the Internet can be said to be a public good. Nevertheless, the networks on which our modern communications are built still produce lingering feelings of suspicion. The sense of exclusion and privilege present in the mid– to late twentieth century seem to be emerging again.24
Net neutrality is often presented as a seemingly straightforward issue of telecommunications companies offering one rate for broadband and dial-up connections to consumers. After five failed attempts to pass neutrality legislation in Congress, the FCC was successful in February 2015 of defining Internet access as a public utility. After silence on the issue of net neutrality for many months, FCC chairperson Tom Wheeler released a statement “aimed at preventing broadband providers from blocking, slowing down, or speeding up specific websites in exchange for payment.”25
Not Netflix’s Idea
Confined to the content of blogs and technology litigation for a decade, net neutrality became a household term when, in August 2014, Netflix began paying for more direct access to Comcast’s customers—to great improvement in video streaming. The issues at the heart of net neutrality address the regulation of Internet traffic and speeds for particular customers. The term that has made Netflix synonymous with the issue of neutrality is “paid prioritization.” Contrary to the way the deal has been presented by media, Netflix did not initiate this prioritization. Comcast began insisting that if Netflix was going to put so much data on its networks that it should pay for it. As Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice said, “They choose the path the traffic takes to us. They can choose to avoid congestion or inflict it.”26 The technical results of the deal were extraordinary for Netflix. Within a week of Netflix’s payments to Comcast, video quality shot up to high-definition levels. Since the deal, Netflix has begun to pay Time Warner Cable, AT&T, and Verizon for similar access to their customers.27
It is too easy to make Netflix the corporate villain in the narrative about net neutrality. The company has done more than many Internet-based companies to bring world class streaming content to consumers for unprecedented low prices. At the time of this essay’s writing, Netflix’s least expensive membership costs $9.99 per month in the United States. The streaming service offers content on a scale that was unheard of and perhaps unimaginable ten years ago when the company was shifting to streaming videos. The quality of the content has been recognized by outside organizations, with various awards for such original series as Arrested Development (2003–2006, 2013), House of Cards (2013–), and Orange Is the New Black (2013–) as well as the 2013 Oscar-nominated documentary The Square. However, it is also dangerous not to see the deal as a clearly antipodal moment in the centrifugal development of the Internet. Netflix did not seek out a tiered system or extra, better access to Comcast’s customers. The fees charged to Netflix were put there initially as a penalty. However, the case has become important for the questions it raises about access, inequality, and the future architecture of the Internet. Consequently, Netflix has become simultaneously a poster child, a battleground, and a scapegoat for the issues bound up in the net neutrality debate, even after the FCC’s decision.
Broadband providers have been the most aggressive opponents of net neutrality rules because the status of broadband as a public utility, while settled by the FCC, is still an open question for providers. Opponents of net neutrality make several arguments for tiered service—some stronger than others from the standpoint of precedent. One of the arguments is that since its first availability for commercial use in the late 1980s, the Internet has been a largely unregulated space. This of course is due to the engineers and developers like Baran and Crocker who envisioned a radically open space for the exchange of ideas and information. This is the actual innovation
of the Internet—not the thinly veiled capital-driven innovation ISPs claim to support when they defend tiered service in the name of creativity or competition. However, the Internet is one of the few broadly public spaces where content is unregulated with the exception of child pornography. The U.S. Supreme Court consistently upholds the rights of those who post and repost videos depicting beheading and other forms of violence.28 The notoriously right-wing group Americans for Prosperity has set up an anti-neutrality site with the ironic title “No Internet Takeover.” A question remains in response to neutrality’s opponents: whom do they want to prevent from taking over the Internet? However, the language that opponents and supporters of net neutrality use does not account for the unresolved, and perhaps more important, issue of what content should be prioritized.
