Lessons from iMeme

And in all honesty, I’m one of them. I’ve been online since 1985, when I discovered BITNET as an undergraduate, sitting at a terminal connected to the campus mainframe. Most of the people using BITNET were computer science majors and may actually have known what they were doing. I was a classicist, but fascinated by the ability to “talk” instantaneously with people at universities around the world—not to mention flattered by the attention I got as one of very few females. I did know there were other networks, because some of my friends at other schools were on ARPANET and I had to take extra steps to get e-mail messages to them.

Then came graduate school. By that time I’d already passed out of the starry-eyed “This is cool!” phase when it came to things like chat rooms. We had Macs in the Classical Studies department and a new set of protocols for communicating. It was 1990 and the Internet was just opening up to the non-university public. The text-only interface of Gopher, Fetch, Telnet, Usenet, and the amazingly primitive e-mail program the University of Michigan favored shaped my online experience. When I bought my first computer and modem, 14.4 kbps was fast.

Never at any point in time did I really understand how any of this worked. I was comfortable with computers and good at following directions. As with many tools of modern society, we don’t have to know how the Internet works to be able to use it. I can drive a car with a manual transmission, but I couldn’t build one, or repair it.

The World Wide Web and our modern browsers and e-mail clients are the equivalent of the automatic transmission. It’s easier than ever to get online, and the Internet is no longer the domain of geeks. In fact, we’ve very nearly achieved the self-driving car, and this may not be such a good thing.

Fortune invited Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet” and now Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, to iMeme to talk about the future of the Internet with David Kirkpatrick.

The first question Kirkpatrick asked was about government attempts to control the Internet. Vint Cerf is an advocate of Network Neutrality, not a fan of control, and believes (or at least hopes) that it will get harder and harder to restrict access to information the Internet. Kirkpatrick then asked why we needed to worry about Net Neutrality if it’s so easy to route around obstacles.

Cerf explained something most of us don’t think much about: that the Internet is made up of layers, with the physical layer of fiber-optic cable, copper wire, modems, and Ethernet on the bottom and the applications we use online at the top. The higher you go through the layers, the easier it is to find alternate routes. No one in Australia can get high-speed access while Telstra keeps Fibre to the Node under lock and key pending a resolution of its dispute with the government.

Despite the 150 million botnets he mentioned in Davos in January, Cerf asserted that the biggest “perturbation” in the Internet over the next few years would be the shortage of IP addresses and the need to move from IPv4 to IPv6. “IP” stands for “Internet Protocol,” and if you want to see something really scary, you can look up the Wikipedia entry.

Every computer, router, modem, etc on the Internet has an IP address, a collection of numbers which acts as a unique identifier. Although these addresses do generally indicate something about geographical location (at least to those who know how to read them), the name “address” is misleading.

The address of your home tells people where to find you, but just knowing where you live doesn’t allow someone to follow you everywhere you go. An IP address is like the “silver cord” which links the spirit to the body. However far you wander in the astral plane, all you (or anyone else who can see it) need to do is follow that cord to get back to your body.

Wherever we go and whatever we do online, we leave a trail behind us like Ariadne’s thread in the Labyrinth. The Internet offers the illusion of anonymity, because most of us lack the skill to find out who is behind a screen name or a junk message. But even people using tools like the TOR anonymity network can be tracked by skilled and determined “adversaries.” If you want to be truly anonymous and untraceable online, you have to resort to practices of questionable legality that fall into the “Kids, don’t try this at home” category of danger and difficulty.

And whatever else you know, or don’t know, about the Internet, it’s important to realize that you are neither anonymous nor invisible. The decision to post something online is irrevocable. And if Big Brother wants to watch you, it’s easier than it ever was before.