The original design of the ARPANET, inherited by the Internet, was inherently peer to peer. I do not use the phrase “peer to peer” here as a euphemism for “file sharing” or other related activities, but in its original architectural sense, that all hosts on the network were logically equals. Certainly, Internet connections differed in bandwidth, latency, and reliability, but apart from those physical properties any machine connected to the Internet could act as a client, server, or neither—simply a peer of those with which it communicated. Any Internet host could provide any service to any other and access any service provided by them. New kinds of services could be invented as required, subject only to compatibility with the higher level transport protocols (such as TCP and UDP).
This architecture made the Internet something unprecedented in the human experience, the first many-to-many mass medium. Let me elaborate a bit on that. Technological innovations in communication dating back to the printing press tended to fall into two categories. The first, exemplified by publishing (newspapers, magazines, and books) and broadcasting (radio and television) was a one-to-many mass medium: the number of senders (publishers, radio and television stations) was minuscule compared to their audience, and the capital costs required to launch a new publication or broadcast station posed a formidable barrier to new entries. The second category, including postal mail, telegrams, and the telephone, is a one-to-one medium; you could (as the technology of each matured) communicate with almost anybody in the world where such service was available, but your communications were person to person—point to point. No communication medium prior to the Internet had the potential of permitting any individual to publish material to a global audience. (Certainly, if one creates a Web site which attracts a large audience, the bandwidth and/or hosting costs can be substantial, yet are still negligible compared to the capital required to launch a print publication or broadcast outlet with comparable reach.)
This had the effect of dismantling the traditional barriers to entry into the arena of ideas, leveling the playing field to such an extent that an individual could attract an audience for their own work, purely on the basis of merit and word of mouth, as large as those of corporate giants entrenched in earlier media. Beyond direct analogues to broadcasting, the peer to peer architecture of the Internet allowed creation of entirely new kinds of media—discussion boards, scientific preprint repositories, web logs with feedback from readers, collaborative open source software development, audio and video conferences, online auctions, music file sharing, open hypertext systems, and a multitude of other kinds of spontaneous human interaction.
A change this profound, taking place in less than a decade (for despite the ARPANET's dating to the early 1970s, it was only as the Internet attracted a mass audience in the late 1990s that its societal and economic impact became significant), must inevitably prove discomfiting to those invested in or basing their communication strategy on traditional media. One needn't invoke conspiracy theories to observe that many news media, music publishers, and governments feel a certain nostalgia for the good old days before the Internet. Back then, there were producers (publishers, broadcasters, wire services) and consumers (subscribers, book and record buyers, television and radio audiences), and everybody knew their place. Governments needn't fret over mass unsupervised data flow across their borders, nor insurgent groups assembling, communicating anonymously and securely, and operating out of sight and beyond the control of traditional organs of state security.
Despite the advent of the Internet, traditional media and government continue to exercise formidable power. Any organisation can be expected to act to preserve and expand its power, not passively acquiesce in its dissipation. Indeed, consolidation among Internet infrastructure companies and increased governmental surveillance of activities on the Internet are creating the potential for the imposition of “points of control” onto the originally decentralised Internet. Such points of control can be used for whatever purposes those who put them in place wish to accomplish. The trend seems clear—over the next five to ten years, we will see an effort to “put the Internet genie back in the bottle”: to restore the traditional producer/consumer, government/subject relationships which obtained before the Internet disrupted them.
A set of technologies, each already in existence or being readied for introduction, can, when widely deployed and employed toward that end, reimpose the producer/consumer information dissemination model on the Internet, restoring the central points of control which traditional media and governments see threatened by its advent. Each of the requisite technologies can be justified on its own as solving clamant problems of the present day Internet, and may be expected to be promoted or mandated as so doing. In the next section, we'll look at these precursor technologies.
