The history of the internet
This is a story of deceit, manipulation, lots of money, political lobbying, lawsuits, and, ultimately, covert theft.
The history of the internet has been one of big capital pilfering from public investment and national infrastructure, the expropriation of academic research, of democratic open-source alternatives being forced illegally from the market, of devices to steal our privacy for profit being quickly snuck into hour homes, our cars, our watches, glasses, and phones.
It’s a story of unethical business practices, of monopoly power, a story that could have been different, and, in the end, a story of competing dreams – hopes – of the future. It’s a big history – one that needs to be told properly – and one in which that verb – to steal – will be returned to. Stealing can happen in many ways; through force, through dispossession, through tricks, power, and cash, of physical infrastructure, of ideas, attention and privacy can be stolen as much as hardware and physical goods. We’ll see how this story has some striking parallels through history – this is the story of the ideologies, the battles, the court cases, the innovations, the lost hopes – from Microsoft to Uber, from eBay to Google, from the US Department of Defence to dimly lit university laboratories, from Napster to 9/11 – of the internet.
The internet is a great ocean: we know that we only swim – paddle – on its surface, never diving beyond the first few pages of search results, rarely interacting outside of our own social network, swimming out occassionally to find a few new journalists or creators to follow, a few new products to buy – buts its depths – what its made of, how it was made, the history that gave shape to it, what lurks in its depth, what might be possible – remain, like the ocean, surprisingly unknown to us.
The internet was meant to be a new utopia – a tool of liberty, fraternity, equality – of radical democracy and freedom. And it might have had its moments, but has a tool celebrated for its openness bit turned into a cage? To understand this, we have to look at the values of those who built it – ask why and how it was designed – what motivated its pioneers, and look at what they came up against.The history of the internet, maybe more than any other histories of our present moment, is the history of our future.
The internet is a complicated system. Even when Charles Babbage designed the first computer – or mechanical calculator in 1819, it was too complicated for Babbage to fund on his own. Babbage received a £17,000 grant – a fortune at the time from the British government to fund his project which still failed. Throughout the industrial revolution, single innovators could design and build machines that were the most complicated devices ever envisaged – alone.
But with computers, this was no longer true. The first two modern computers were built at the University of Illinois Centre of Innovation in 1951, funded by the Department of Defence and the US Army. Just 18 years later, in 1969, at the height of the counterculture revolution, four computer terminals were connected remotely for the first time at universities across the US from California to Utah. The project was the continued result of Department of Defence financing through DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, investment that would cost the US taxpayer 124 million dollars, almost a billion in today’s money.
The result was a network called ARPANET – The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Why was so much money spent? From its inception, ARPANET was the culmination of two visions. The first, was to find a way for academics to exchange data across institutions, and importantly, to share computing power, which at the time was expensive, slow, and valuable to researchers at the universities ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld remembered that ‘ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.’ It was, as historian Brian McCullough puts it, a ‘researcher’s dream of a scholarly utopia.’ But I was also a product of the cold war. And the Deputy Director, Stephen Lukasik, has challenged how Herzfeld remembers its development. He said ‘the goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.’
