The Development Of The Internet


Ian Drew - May 2001



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Question 1 - Briefly describe in no more than 300 words the nature of the internet and the different networks which comprise the internet.

The Internet is the term used to describe 60,000 or so interconnected networks that all use the TCP/IP protocols evolving from the US Department of Defence's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANet) of the late 1960' and early 1970's. The Internet allows the computers and hence their users to communicate and share cyberspace resources and services. A network can be simply defined as two or more computers (referred to as nodes) connected together so that they share resources, when two or more of these networks are connected an internet is created. The present basis for the system is NSFNET to which 200,000+ computers are directly connected via the network's own backbone system, in addition other computers are connected indirectly via networking systems. An example of the networking system is provided by Roger Karraker (1991) who described the 3,500+ user Whole Earth computer conferencing system (WELL) linked to Apple Computers mainframes to Pacific Bell's computers and to the University of California at Berkeley. Another example is the BITNET a shrinking network of educational sites separate from the internet but allowing e-mails to be freely exchanged between the two. All machines on a network will usually have a common final portion of a domain name. Networks can either be described as Wide Area networks (WANs) covering a large area or Local Area Networks (LANs) covering a small geographical area - perhaps in the same building. Some networks will be fully open to the internet while for others called Virtual Private Networks (VPN) the information traffic using the internet link is encrypted. Network speeds using Ethernet in a LAN at a rate of about 10,000,000 bits per second or by FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) at a rate 10 times faster.


Question 2 - State what TCP/IP is and when it was invented and briefly describe its importance to the internet.

The acronym TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol. The original specification for TCP/IP was published in 1974 by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, but it did not become the designated unified profile for ARPANET until 1983. A network protocol is the set of detailed rules, sequences, message formats, and procedures that computer systems use and understand when exchanging data with each other. The TCP is the method by which data on the Internet is divided into packets of bytes at the source machine and then reassembled at the destination. Each packet is delimited with header information that includes the destination address to where the packet is to be routed when it is transmitted over the Internet. The IP handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks with multiple standards TCP/IP is a four layer protocol, the lowest layer is the link layer, above this are a network layer, a transport layer and an application layer.


Question 3 - Briefly describe in no more than 300 words the density and geographical spread of the World Wide Web.

According to the PBS media group in 1996 over 40 million users were connected to the internet in 150 countries of the world. According to a 1998 Computer Industry Report the number of home users for the Internet and World Wide Web was predicted to grow at a little more than 36% each from 1997-2001. By 1999 the Internet connected more than 72 million host computers in 247 countries. Packet traffic, a measure of the amount of data flowing over the network, continues to increase exponentially. Traffic and capacity of the Internet grew at rates of about 100% per year in the early 1990s. There was then a brief period of explosive growth in 1995 and 1996. During those two years, traffic grew by a factor of about 100, which is about 1,000% a year. In 1997, traffic growth slowed to about 100% per year. In July 2000, Cyveillance, an Internet consulting company, estimated that there were 2.1 billion unique, publicly available pages on the Internet. Cyveillance states that the Internet grows by 7.3 million pages each day, which means that it would have doubled in size by early 2001.

The web site Netsizer.com reports that the following statistics;

Number of internet users by continent (thousands):

Africa3327.43
Asia74956.6
Europe94573.0
Oceania18348.4
Central America1487.45
South America17453.2
North America199908.0


The top 5 countries for internet usage (based on thousands of users):

USA175690.0
Japan43893.7
UK43209.1
Germany31266.1
Canada24218.3


The 5 top fastest expanding internet nations:

1Columbia
2Ukraine
3Czechoslovakia
4Singapore
5Sweden

The Netsizer site also includes a counter which counts the increasing number of global internet users in real time! On Sunday the 13th of May 2001 at 6.54pm the number was 451,864,067.


Question 4 - List the 5 most used languages on the World Wide Web as a percentage of the total in 1995 and the most current date you can find.

For 1995/96:

RankLanguage% of Total
1English80
2Japanese4
3Scandinavian4
4German0.5
=5French0.2
=5Spanish0.2


Cyberatlas reported the following listing of web pages by language for July 2000:

RankLanguage% of Total
1English68.39
2Japanese5.85
3German5.77
4Chinese3.87
5French2.96
Note that for this research the Scandinavian languages were condidered individually - if they had been counted together as they had in the figures presented for 1995/96 Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Finnish and Icelandic would have accounted for 2.19% of web pages. Therefore they would still not feature in the top five chart.


Question 5 - List the 10 most popular bought items on the Internet in the USA and UK.

The following sales statistics are for a single week and represent sales in the USA, it should be noted that the week in question included the Thanksgiving Holiday. The figures have been taken from a PC Data Online press release dated November 30th 2000.

Product CategorySpending (in thousands)
Travel Tickets$246,373
Computer Hardware$184,800
Toys & Childrens items$94,487
Apparel$77,689
Electronics$61,160
Food & Grocery$45,568
Video & DVD$44,528
Games Software$40,705
Books$40,040
Event Tickets$38,424



Question 6 - List the 10 most searched items on the Internet in the USA and UK.

The American site for the Lycos search engine publishes a weekly top 50 user search chart called the Lycos 50, the top ten for the week ending April the 28th 2001 was as follows.

RankSearch Topic
1Dragonball (Manga game)
2Ellis Island (Geneology site)
3Britney Spears (Pop princess)
4Napster (Music file sharing)
5Tattoos (Skin art)
6Survivor (Big brother on a desert island)
7Pokeman (Cards & cartoons)
8Pamela Anderson (Actress?)
9WWF (Wresling)
10Final Fantasy (Gaming)

The ten most popular items searched for on the UK based search eneine goto since its launch in November 2000, as reportwed in the Sunday Times Doors magazine 20-05-01.

RankSearch
1Mobile phone ringtones
2Car
3Job
4Holiday
5Car insurance
6Flights
7Chat room
8Chat
9Cheap flights
10Big brother



Question 7 - In general there are no legal restraints to Internet access. List the countries where Internet access is restricted or forbidden by law.

Reporters Sans Frontiers and Transfert.net have released "Enemies of the Internet: Obstacles to the free flow of information on the Internet" [fr], a report examining threats to freedom on the Internet. The study looks at fifty-nine democractic and non-democratic countries and possible threats to cyber-liberties. It is probably fair to say that the ammount of restriction varies greatly between the diverse set of nations included.

The countries listed on the site at www.rsf.fr/uk/homennemis are:

Afghanistan; Algeria; Angola; Argentina; Australia; Azerbaijan; Belarus; Bhutan; Burma; Cameroon; Chile; China; Cuba; D R Congo; Ethipia; France; Germany; India; Iraq; Iran; Italy; Kazahstan; Kenya; Laos; Lebanon; Malaysia; Mauritania; Mexico; Moroco; Mozambique; North Korea; Oman; Parkistan; Peru; Russia; Saudi Arabia; Sierra Leone; Singapore; South Korea; Spain; Sri Lanka; Sudan; Switzerland; Syria; Tajikistan; Tailand; Tunsia; Turkey; Turkmenistan; Ukraine; United Arab Emirats; United Kingdom; United States of America; Uzbeckistan; Vietnam; Yugoslavia; Zambia; Zimbabwe.


Question 8 - The internet is currently largely unregulated. However many National Governments now feel the need to regulate the internet with national and international laws. Many academics argue that this would stifle future development. In not more than 500 words argue the case for either governmental regulation or no regulation.

Cyberspace and electronic communications are a powerful media for the public's use, the "information superhighway" allows innumerable viewpoints to be presented, provides access to vast stores of data, and enables a kind of global discussion for anyone wishing to participate. The Internet's power and rapid expansion make many governments, including those of the developed "free-world" uneasy, In response governments are picking a number of controversial and unpopular activities to regulate and prohibit, to get its regulatory foot in the Internet door.

Most of what is objectionable on the Internet is already illegal. Regardless of format, illegally obscene or indecent material is subject to existing statutes. Other controversial items on the Internet fall under free speech protection. However repulsive one may find racist hate speech (as I certainly do), it is protected by laws of free speech until it incites a "clear and present danger" to the peace. David Lawrence, overseer of USENET has even stated that it is beneficial to see people doing "despicable things" online - so that other people can "reply and discredit them." That is something that government could never do.

Internet regulation is virtually impossible and impractical as well. The network spans the globe; no one country controls the communication or content. For one nation to impose restrictions on usage or content available, one of two things must result: a world-wide incapacitation of the network or a heated international diplomatic debacle. German interference in CompuServe content offerings necessitated disabling of those services not only in Germany, but also the rest of Europe and the United States. Even if rules could be restricted to one nation such regulation would have strikingly unintended consequences. A moderate interpretation of the proposed laws could codify such seemingly benign discussions of breast cancer, medicine, or politics as indecent and hence, illegal on-line. Such regulation could possibly harm those who most benefit from the electronic communication. Kiyoshi Kuromiya, founder and sole operator of Critical Path Aids Project, has a web site that includes safer sex information written in street language with explicit diagrams, in order to reach an audience ignored by traditional medical education. It is likely that given state control and censorship his speech will be classified as "pornography" and blocked from view - this could result in the loss of a life which could have been saved.

Implementing and enforcing Internet regulations would be a bureaucratic fiasco. First, the government would require a new bureaucracy or expansion of an existing one to handle the enormous task of monitoring on-line communication. Secondly, who would be liable for any infractions of the law? The person who submitted the material, his service provider, or both. Partly as a result of this uncertainty the Internet industry is already at work disciplining itself. Rating systems and censoring software are proving that there is no real need for a governmental authority to regulate the Internet. Moreover, it is no government's place or responsibility to play nanny.

It is impossible to imagine that there will be no government intervention in the Internet. The best-case scenario would have government regulation limited to copyright protection and upholding established decency laws. A higher level of governmental regulation must not be allowed to occur, for regulation would surely do much more harm than good. It is essential to bear in mind that dictators have always used a controlled press to silence opposition and to feed lies to their citizens. The population of Britain would rightly not accept government ownership or control of the newspapers, TV or radio - why should the Internet be any different? Parents should control what their children and they are exposed to on the Internet, be it through direct control or a software censor. Adults should be able to freely choose what they will watch listen to or download, without "Big Brother" making those decisions for them.


APPENDIX - WEB BIBLIOGRAPHY

General Internet resources
learning.lib.vt.edu/wintcpip/wintcpip .html (Windows and TCP/IP for Internet access by Harry M. Kriz)
www.eff.org/pub/ Infrastructure/hiways_of_mind.article (Highways of the Mind or Toll Roads Between Information Castles? By Roger Karraker)
www.matisse.net/files/glossary.html (Glossary of Internet Terms by Matisse Enzer)
windows.about.com/compute (General link to relevant articles)
www.halcyon. com/cliffg/uwteach/shared_info/internet_protocols.html (An Introduction to Internet Protocols for Newbies by Cliff Green)
www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline (Hobbes' Internet Timeline v5.3 by Robert H'obbes' Zakon)
www.forthnet.gr/forthnet /isoc/short.history.of.internet (Short History of the Internet by Bruce Sterling)
www.statmarket.com
www.mediametrix.com
uk.jupitermmxi.com/home.jsp
www.itp-journals.com (PC Support Advisor)
www.cnie.org/nle/st-36.html (Internet and E-Commerce Statistics: What They Mean and Where to Find Them on the Web by Rita Tehan)
www.netsizer.com
www.lycos.com
www.dataonline.com
www.internetstats.com


Internet regulation resources
www.eff.org (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
www.gilc.org (Global Internet Liberty Campaign)
www.hrw.org (Human Rights Watch)
www.isoc.org (Internet Society)
www.rsf.fr/uk/homennemis.html (Reporters Sans Frontiers)
www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/burning.html (American Civil Liberties Union / Freedom Network)