What is the Internet anyway?
The Internet explained
In the early days of the internet there is a famous story from a company looking to get investment for their internet startup. One of the challenges they faced was explaining to the investors what The Internet actually was. After many failed attempts to explain it at a conceptual technical level the company finally decided to bring a visual aid. During one of the investment meetings they rolled a server sitting on a table into the room. The representatives for the company pointed at the server and said “that is the internet.”
It was not, in fact, The Internet — it was a visual and corporeal structure that enabled the investors to accept that they knew what The Internet is. The story may be apocryphal, but it is illustrative because, even today, for most people, the true nature of The Internet is opaque.
We refer to The Internet as a singular structure, but in reality it is more precise to think of it as a plural: ‘The Internets’. The Internet is a collection of nodes (computers or networks) which communicate over an agreed upon protocol. One could create an internet using any accepted protocol. A protocol is any agreed upon system of rules that allows two or more entities to communicate in a communication system. A handshake is a protocol; both parties agree on the gesture and what it signifies. Morse Code, The Phonetic Alphabet, and TCP/IP are all protocols.
The dominant protocols for what is referred to as The Internet are the transmission control protocol (TCP) and the internet protocol (IP). Together they make up the TCP/IP stack which is the backbone of most communication on The Internet and indeed on most modern digital networks.
One of the beautiful things about protocols is that they are independent of the transmission medium. This is why an internet can be created over physical mediums like ethernet and radio waves like WiFi. And as long as the protocol is remembered it can never be destroyed or shut down, because protocols are conceptual, not material.
Another powerful aspect of protocols is that they can be stacked. Consider grammar: it is a protocol — a set of rules governing how sounds are ordered and interpreted — that gives rise to higher-order protocols like politeness, and upon those we build societies that produce literature and music. Similarly, upon the internet protocols we can stack new protocols like the hypertext protocol (HTTP), which allows one to view a website, or transport layer security (TLS), which enables secure communication between two servers.
As it relates to digital serfdom and one’s capacity to escape it, this distinction is critical. What Google, Facebook, and Amazon control are not The Internet — they are platforms built on an internet. The protocols themselves are owned by no one, which means they can be used by anyone. As long as the protocols are remembered, the infrastructure of a free and open internet can always be rebuilt.