[Air-l] A definition of the internet

[Ralf Bendrath]

Kevin Guidry wrote:

> TCP/IP as the
> underlying protocol of the majority of the Internet is a historical
> accident.  Other protocols that provided the same functionality could
> just as easily been used.
Well, there were massive efforts underway around the same time in the ITU 
and related venues to establish X.400 as the major standard for 
interconnecting different networks. It would have been a different 
Inter-Network for sure. The domain layer and the transport layer were 
identical, so your email address was also used for routing. It would have 
been technically impossible to use the TLD "tv" outside Tuvalu. And the 
network topology with gateways at the national borders resembled the 
multilateral political model of the ITU/UN culture.

In the end, the Internet (as we know it) won over the tightly-controlled 
X.400 network. Which is not an accident, but happened for various reasons, 
the major one being that X.400 was tightly controlled, I guess.

> my LAN at home is still essentially the same despite moving from
> Ethernet over Cat5 to 802.11g over the air.
I bet it is not the same. It probably has changed the routines of using 
it, as well as security and other considerations, like sharing it with the 
neighbors.

> we are replacing one of the core
> protocols used on the Internet with another protocol but it's still
> going to be the Internet.
Or it is not, depending on where you look. The Internet we know is already 
not there anymore (if it ever has been) in China, Saudi-Arabia, and even 
some places in Germany, where Nazi websites are filtered by the ISPs. And 
look at the Net Neutrality debate in the US. If you mean "any data network 
that allows me to connect to others around the world", then we will always 
have some "Internet", and we had it before with earlier services. But then 
X.400 also was an "Internet". But it will have different features.

I think the debate is becoming a bit tiring. It is up to us how we define 
the "Internet", depending on our research purposes. We can also call it 
"Bill" if we want. More important is how the definition helps us doing 
research ojn specific aspects of the beast.
Instead of having this "no, my definition is more right than yours" go on 
forever, it would be more helpful to list the different research strands 
and theories and try to come up with definitions of "the Internet" from 
the different perspectives. That would be much more fruitful to my 
understanding.

 From a political science point of view, I would say: The debate over net 
neutrality shows very nicely that part of the political struggle over what 
kind of network we want is defining the "Internet".

Best, Ralf

-- 
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Dipl. Pol. Ralf Bendrath
University of Bremen
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