<nettime> Networks in Reverse - From the Interplanetary Internet via the ARPANET

[Suzanne Treister <suzyRB@va.com.au>]

Networks in Reverse
From the Interplanetary Internet via the ARPANET to the Last 
Pre-Internet Moment


Vinton G. Cerf, U.S. Internet pioneer, Google's Chief Internet 
Evangelist and creator of the Interplanetary Internet, was pacing around 
his lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Concerned 
that the Interplanetary Internet had been incurring large delays and 
errors in communication due to the increasing distances involved, he 
scratched at his grey beard as he read the latest bulletin from The 
Daily Tech on the screen of his console.

   'NASA Plans Hack-proof "Interplanetary Internet" for Use in Mars, 
Moon Missions. Architectures should be cost effective, extensible and 
sustainable in a flat and/or decreasing budget environment'
   
http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Plans+Hackproof+Interplanetary+Internet+for+Use+in+Mars+
   Moon+Missions/article30102.htm

Over the following months signal degradation set in across the IPN 
network and as a result the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects 
Agency (DARPA) held a conference to resolve the issue. The following day 
they released the news that they were pulling funding from the IPN project.

Subsequently all space probes and satellites which had served as Net 
gateways, conveying data packets to and from Earth and among themselves 
were retasked. Vint Cerf's dream of a collaborative, stable backbone of 
satellites serving as IPN's nucleus was eradicated.

With funding freed up from interplanetary communications, DARPA now had 
more than adequate finance for its DARWARS military simulation game 
training project. In their own words: "Continuous online, mission-level 
training. Cognitive training systems that include elements of 
human-tutor interactions and the emotional involvement of computer games 
coupled with the feedback of Combat Training Center learning. Using the 
example of commercial, persistent, massive multiplayer online games, the 
program will link these new training approaches with existing Service 
and Joint training systems into a self-sustaining architecture, allowing 
continuous on-demand training anywhere, anytime, for everyone."

DARWARS' primary architecture developer was the military subcontractor 
Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) Technologies, who had led a wide range of 
research and development projects including the U.S. military's 
'Boomerang' mobile shooter detection system; quantum information 
processing; 'Natural Communication with Avatars Through Speech and 
Gesture' technology; and the standardisation effort for Internet 
security architecture (IPsec).

After several years in operation and many round table discussions 
DARWARS was decommissioned by the US Government. The decision had no 
tangible effect on the average person in the street. The territorial 
network for civilians was still the Intercloud, the interconnected 
global Cloud of Clouds, an extension of the Internet network of 
networks, one global interconnected database. Housed in multiple data 
warehouses across the globe the Intercloud facilitated access to all 
'available' data, no matter which Cloud corporation you happened to 
subscribe to for your data storage, network communications and apps.

Led by a broad coalition of industry practitioners, corporations, 
associations and other key stakeholders, including the U.S. Department 
of Defense, eBay, Google, Amazon and assorted telephone companies, 
security analytics professionals and arms manufacturers, the concept of 
a Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) was born at the Information Systems 
Security Association (ISSA) CISO Forum in Las Vegas. The CSA was a 
non-profit organisation formed to promote the use of best practices for 
providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and provide 
education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms 
of computing.

When, despite best efforts, secure transmission between individual data 
warehouses became increasingly problematic, the architectures of the 
Cloud and the Intercloud were gradually abandoned. For the time being, 
however, Internet governance bodies remained in place.

Governance that shaped uses of the Internet had been overseen by 
several, for the most part, U.S. controlled entities. United Nations 
World Summits on the Information Society were held where the U.S. 
Department of Commerce had made it clear that it intended to retain 
control of the Internet's root servers indefinitely.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was a 
U.S. non-profit corporation founded by Jon Postel in California which 
controlled and managed the Internet's Infrastructure. Vinton Cerf was on 
board ICANN for the first decade.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) was the body that oversaw 
global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root 
zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other 
Internet Protocol-related symbols and numbers. IANA was operated by 
ICANN. Prior to the establishment of ICANN for this purpose, IANA was 
administered primarily by Jon Postel at the Information Sciences 
Institute of the University of Southern California, under a contract 
USC/ISI had with the United States Department of Defense, until ICANN 
was created to assume the responsibility under a United States 
Department of Commerce contract.

The Internet Society (ISOC) was an international, non-profit 
organization founded to provide direction in Internet related standards, 
education, and policy. It stated that its mission was "to assure the 
open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of 
all people throughout the world". Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Lyman Chapin 
released a document, announcing ISOC, which explained the rationale for 
establishing the Internet Society. ISOC had offices near Washington, DC, 
USA, and in Geneva, Switzerland. It had a membership base comprising 
more than 80 organisational and more than 28,000 individual members. 
Members also formed "chapters" based on either common geographical 
location or special interests. There were more than 90 chapters around 
the world.

ISOC conducted a great range of activities under three main categories, 
namely standards, public policy, and education. Under the standards 
category, ISOC supported and promoted the work of the standards settings 
bodies for which it was the organisational home: the Internet 
Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), 
the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), and the Internet 
Research Task Force (IRTF). ISOC also sought to promote understanding 
and appreciation of the Internet model of open, transparent processes 
and consensus-based decision making.

One of the most powerful commercial online players, Google Inc., the 
American multinational public corporation, was heavily invested in 
Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. After 
many years of successful enterprise, a series of failed lawsuits caused 
Google to descend slowly into liquidation. One by one Google 
systematically scaled down its operations, closing its acquisitions, 
internal sectors and online applications formerly known as Google Earth, 
Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Street View, Google Books, its video 
-sharing site YouTube, Google files on worldwide Genetic data, and 
finally its algorithmic personally targeted advertising services for 
third party websites. All other online corporations and multinationals 
eventually followed suit. The satellite which had provided Google with 
high-resolution imagery for Google Earth was returned to Vandenberg Air 
Force Base on the same day as Google deleted the entire known Web from 
its database. The company's unofficial slogan, coined by Google engineer 
Paul Buchheit, "Don't be evil" was relegated to history books, chipped 
mugs and T shirts.

As a consequence of this cyber cataclysm, all corporate owned social and 
professional networking sites, e.g. Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, MySpace, 
LinkedIn, Nexopia, Bebo, Hyves, StudiVZ, iWiW, Tuenti, Tagged, XING, 
Badoo, Skyrock, Orkut and Hi5, Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Wretch, 
Cyworld, simultaneously shut down and millions of gigabytes of user data 
became dead code in abandoned data warehouses.

The Googleplex site at Mountain View, California slowly fell into 
disrepair, developing the look of an ex worldÕs fair ground and 
inevitably becoming a tourist attraction which was soon served by a 
retro-hippy bus tour company from San Francisco. Nearby the National 
Science Foundation (NSF), together with DARPA and NASA, were winding up 
the Digital Library Initiative, refusing a grant application to Stanford 
University, with the result that two graduate students, Larry Page and 
Sergey Brin abandoned developing a search engine using the links between 
Web pages as a ranking method.

Due to closure of all web based economies and loss of a cooperative 
backdoor entry for Governments and the CIA, the U.S. National Security 
Agency's PRISM, TIA and other such data surveillance projects were 
abandoned, the U.S. Cyber Command program was decommissioned and funds 
were no longer available for the numerous Internet governance bodies.

What had become known as Net War or Info War and its associated 
terrorist and anonymous networks, networked revolution, the activities 
of civil society activists and hacktivists gradually ceased to function. 
Likewise, swarming attacks, info leaking, attacks on financial, 
transport, power and food supply systems, spying on and subversion of 
industrial systems, awareness raising, evasion of government censors and 
monitors, collective action organising and decentralised network 
structures began to dwindle to a halt in the digital realm.

Online grassroots networks disappeared one after the other. Nettime, a 
discussion mailing list for networked cultures, politics and tactics, 
was abolished by Geert Lovink; The WELL was abandoned by Stewart Brand 
and Larry Brilliant, and the so called 'new media' festivals and 
conferences which had sought, encouraged and represented the engagement 
of artists, writers and theorists in new technologies and the politics 
of the Net, became redundant. Evangelical Net communities living in 
disparate and often marginalised parts of the globe, who had come 
together through listservs and euphoric fantasies for the potential of 
an Internet based global change for the better, for empowerment and 
border free communication for the politically disenfranchised and the 
war torn, became disillusioned.

Pretty soon Vint Cerf closed down the Internet Society, and the US 
National Science Foundation closed the Internet to commercial use. 
Months later the text based virtual space 'Lambdamoo' finally went 
offline and The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a 
U.S. Department of Defense funded project which had pioneered the early 
Internet, resumed its operations.

At CERN in Geneva Tim Berners Lee disabled communications between all 
HTTP clients and servers via the Internet and dismantled the World Wide Web.

At around the same time Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris and Craig Partridge 
redesigned the Domain Name System (DNS), removing all domain names 
ending in .edu .gov .com .mil .org .net and .int.

The DCA combined MILNET with ARPANET where at the time there were 68 
nodes on ARPANET, and 45 on MILNET, the military network and Vint Cerf 
replaced Barry Leiner at DARPA managing the Internet.

Leonard Kleinrock held the key mathematical background to packet 
switching and an ARPANET network was re-established between KleinrockÕs 
lab at UCLA and Douglas EngelbartÕs lab at SRI and the initial 4-node 
network was reconnected with UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.

Vinton G. Cerf went on to work in Kleinrock's data packet networking 
group at UCLA that connected the first 2 nodes of ARPANET, then went 
back to work at IBM before returning to Stanford.

Robert Elliot Kahn, who had invented Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) 
and Internet Protocol (IP) with Vint Cerf and written, 'Host to IMP 
Spec. 1822' at BBN which detailed the interface between ARPANET host 
computers and the Interface Message Processors, returned via MIT to his 
position at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, AT&T.

Lawrence Roberts, the first Information Processing Technologies Office 
(IPTO) chief scientist, began design of ARPANET, upon becoming Director 
of IPTO.

Robert W. Taylor who had conceived of and directed funding for ARPANET 
and who with J. C. R. Licklider had written, 'The Computer as a 
Communication Device', the paper which led to the creation of ARPANET, 
returned from his new role as Director of IPTO at ARPA to work for NASA. 
Taylor decided to leave ARPA after congress pushed for it to focus its 
work towards advancing military missions during the Vietnam War, because 
his mission was for the technology to be available to all.

Ivan Sutherland took over as head of IPTO at ARPA and was shortly 
replaced by J. C. R. Licklider. Licklider, known for his work in 
Artificial Intelligence and cybernetics, dissuaded Sutherland, Taylor 
and Roberts from developing the Internet.


Suzanne Treister 2013
Published in: 'Networks', Edited by Lars Bang Larsen, Whitechapel 
Documents of Contemporary Art, published by MIT Press 2014

--------------------------------
Suzanne Treister
http://www.suzannetreister.net/


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