What Is the Internet?

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Recent discussions regarding net neutrality have jogged my brain into contemplating an admittedly abstract, but surprisingly practical question: What is the Internet?

I'm not asking the question from a simplistic definitive perspective, but rather from a deeper, more philosophical one. What is the Internet? What is not the Internet? How do we define the boundaries of a technological wonder that is vastly reshaping the social landscape?

I suppose I shall start by getting some formalities out of the way. Generally, I am in favor of net neutrality as a principle, but I am also in favor of people using their brains when it comes to dealing with the real implications of the policy. For example, wireless cellular networks have severely limited bandwidth capabilities, and it would be foolish to apply the same rules to them as to terrestrial hard-line networks with excess fiber capacity. For another example, even though net neutrality preaches that all packets are equal, certain services, such as VoIP and real-time video, are necessarily handicapped under such a system and some understanding and innovation needs to be applied to finding a real solution to this obstacle.

At the same time as I support a net neutrality principle, I am strongly opposed to general regulation on the Internet. In addition to the dangers to liberty simply introduced by such a scenario, general regulation combined with general technological ignorance can breed a legal nightmare for even the smallest of innovators, simply by failing to understand legally what the Internet is.

So now I've arrived back at the question at hand: What is the Internet? Technically, it's an interconnected network of networks (inter-: between, -net: networks), or at least that's an internet. The Internet, though, is defined moreso by the services it offers, most notably the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is, of course, the network of hypertext and hyperlinks that we casually refer to as web pages. So then, we can assume that any computer on the World Wide Web must necessarily be on the Internet, but the truth is that the World Wide Web is equally as ill-defined as the Internet itself, leading us back onto the original problem. Indeed, the undefined-ness of the World Wide Web will itself become apparent as we demonstrate the undefined-ness of the Internet itself.

Why is the Internet so hard to define, though? It's really just servers and routers and computers and an unimaginable amount of cable. So let's start with a simple question: is your home network a part of the Internet? Let's start with what would make us say yes. Our network is connected to the Internet through our modem (cable, DSL, etc.), meaning we have an IP address on the Internet. We can access services on the Internet such as the World Wide Web and others. Our network utilizes the fundamental technologies of the Internet, including TCP, IP, DNS, and others. Given this line of argument, our home network is on the Internet. Of course, that now also means that our home network also falls under all of the potential regulations that any authority might devise. This thought might make you a little uncomfortable, and you might now be eagerly anticipating my counter-examples. To start, while your modem or network router might have an Internet IP address, your networked systems have private IP addresses, addresses that could be any address in theory, but generally are in the 192.168.0.0/16 or 10.0.0.0/8 ranges. Routers that make use of these address spaces are utilizing a technology known as NAT. If your networked machines (and the networked machines of others) were on the Internet, we'd have address collisions left and right or we'd quickly run out of unique addresses due to the relatively small IPv4 address space. Furthermore, NAT acts as a firewall between the network and the Internet at large, by its nature disallowing unsolicited inbound connections and altering outbound connections on multiple layers. Additionally, you do not (generally) resell your Internet access as an ISP. You are not accountable to customers or shareholders because you have none, therefore disqualifying you as a publicly-accountable service provider.

The notion that your home network is part of the general Internet is superficial and not generally supported upon deeper inspection, as shown above. Now the next step takes this a bit further to include a class of networks that generally have the same qualifications as the home network described above, but at the same time would seem to logically fall into a similar category as the Internet. I am speaking of private business networks. There are two kinds that I will discuss here: those business networks closed to the public, and those networks open to the public. Closed business networks are commonly described as intranets. They are generally used for the purpose of providing access both to private company resources and to the public Internet (or a subset of the Internet). Intranets typically use NAT just as home networks do. Intranets also can provide many Internet-class services including private, internal web servers; internal databases; web proxies; and internal hosted programs to name a few. They can also offer different network-class services such as virtual private networking, networked storage, and roaming log-on profiles. Intranets are more likely to be categorized with home networks as private and separate from the general Internet, but they also highlight the how the boundaries of the Internet can be blurred. Workers inside the intranet see private and public Internet-class services equally, and can access equivalent services through equivalent software. A private company wiki appears no differently to them than Wikipedia (here the boundaries of the World Wide Web are also blurred). To them, there is virtually no boundary between where the intranet ends and the Internet begins, but to the Internet at large, the boundary is quite clear, ending at the router where NAT is performed.

Then there is the open type of business network. The most common form of these is the publicly-accessible wireless hotspot. Anyone can connect to the network, whether for pay or for free. These networks are close siblings of both the home network and the intranet, most closely resembling the former. Open networks will generally also use NAT to translate addresses, and will therefore isolate networked systems in the same manner as above. Open networks can, but generally do not offer Internet-class or intranet-class services on the network (excepting perhaps a log-in system), though there is nothing preventing them from doing so. While these networks in nearly every way replicate the qualities of their siblings, the home network and the intranet, they much more than them would be classified as falling under Internet regulation, since they are generally reselling Internet access to customers. It would make sense to then apply the same rules to them as to larger ISPs, and yet their network management concerns more closely match those of the smaller networks above discussed. They would be more worried about providing consistent, limited bandwidth over a limited, error-prone medium (radio waves via air). They would not want a neutral network, but would rather limit bandwidth-hogging applications such as Skype and real-time video to provide a better general experience to all of their customers. In this case, net neutrality could be worse for the network users.

This then leaves open the question of whether public-access business networks are part of the Internet. They qualify in some regards and disqualify in others. Yet this question still has not been explored to the absolute limit. As described above, the Internet is defined by the services it offers, such as the World Wide Web, yet every fundamental service on the Internet can be replicated separately on a completely different network. I described above how intranets can have private, internal services hidden from the Internet at large. These services use the same technologies and standards as the Internet at large, though. Indeed, one could create their own private internet completely separate from the Internet by simply creating a network with all of the common services such as DNS, e-mail, web servers, etc. There is nothing legal or technological inhibiting such a development. Now the question arises as to whether this separate network is a part of the Internet. The answer should be apparent, but then again perhaps not. This new network could provide an equal level of service, and could provide equally as many commercial and expressive opportunities as the Internet. Does it qualify as a part of the Internet at inception, since it uses Internet technology? Does it qualify as the Internet once access is sold to even one person? Does it qualify as the Internet once it reaches a certain size? Does it never qualify as the Internet, even if it grew to become more prolific than the Internet? If it does not qualify as part of the Internet, then does that mean that regulators are nothing more than national network administrators of one network called the Internet? If it does qualify, then where does the network, and the reach of those who might regulate it end?

I don't know the answers to these questions. Perhaps someone smarter than me has already found these answers. Despite that, I still believe these are questions we need to ask. We need to know what the Internet is before we can ever hope to deal with it in any meaningful way.