Joy of Access: The Internet

The Internet is a collection of networks. That’s what the name means: it’s a way of hooking different networks together and translating their different languages to a Universal language and back again. So, for example, Apple Macintosh computers, on an Apple network can talk to Windows computers on a Novell network. They share data—electronic mail, literary works, risqué pictures—via the Internet, even though the Windows computers can’t talk Apple, and the Apple computers aren’t configured to talk Windows.

Because the Internet Protocol is kept reasonably simple, any computer can talk it, so most do. You’ve got VMS, Unix, OS/2, OS-9, Xenix, Penix, and Eunuchs all talking to each other in their own language, translated into and out of “the Internet Protocol”. We’ve finally reversed the damage done by the Tower of Babel, and God, no doubt, is wondering what we’re going to do for an encore.

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

There are elected and appointed officials in the United States who share the Old Testament opinion of a freely-informed populace. Fortunately, the Internet is designed to be far more flexible than a radio tower, and will likely be much harder to stomp. Jesus said, “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” He knew what the Internet was about as well.

The Internet is not one big system. It’s a whole bunch of little systems, each of which don’t really care about the others, at least from a technical standpoint. Huge parts of the Internet are connecting and disconnecting at any given time, and this doesn’t bother the other parts of the Internet that happen to be stable at that time.

There is no central control of the Internet. The Internet operates on the principle of cooperative anarchy. Each person or computer on the Internet cooperates with whatever other parts of the Internet it feels like cooperating with. The end result is that everyone cooperates with everyone else through intermediaries, so everything sails along fairly well.

Don’t worry, eventually the government will step in to force cooperation and thus end all cooperation. But until then, the Internet is a very useful place to be.