Politicos prove their ignorance about the internet


"Protect" the internet or control it? You decide
Stories like this always amaze me. It proves again and again that politicos do not know their history and do not understand the internet.

So in the public interest, let's have a history lesson.

The internet which carries the world wide web, started as ARPANET. The whole idea was to construct a network that could withstand massive disruption and still move information from place to place. The network was designed to be decentralized so that losing nodes would not stop the data, the network would just route around the disruption.

We take packet switching for granted now, but that wasn't always so. Not all that long ago, if a computer controlled something remotely, it needed a dedicated circuit.

For a government agency to "protect" the internet, there would have to be government "central nodes" that all data would have to pass through, much as happens in China today. Not only would "central nodes" introduce a weakness (and slow down the network), "central nodes" would also allow government to monitor ALL internet traffic and potentially censor/change information on the fly.

The internet in the United States would go from being a decentralized network to a highly centralized one. Which ironically would undermine the goal of "protecting" the network.

Right now if something took out every internet connection in Los Angeles, I could still get news from Denver, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and almost anywhere else where the internet connections still worked. My emails to Toronto would still go through. I could still check out that webcam in Sydney.

But if we had government "protecting" the internet, losing internet connections in L.A. could mean that all of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico could go out.

Don't laugh, between things like the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and WAPA, we know that the Federal government loves to combine things that really don't fit together well.

The brilliant thing about packet data on a decentralized network is that it's extremely fault-tolerant. There is redundancy and self-correction built into the system. Since all the data doesn't travel in a "straight line" in one uninterrupted stream, it moves around places where the network fails and the users on either end never notice.

That is just not possible with a centralized network.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - September 28, 2009 at 11:21 AM  Tag


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