03
DTC 101
The Internet
The Internet, short for "interconnected network" and sometimes referred to as "The Net", is made up of a range of information resources and services, such as the World Wide Web, electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing. As a "network of networks", it interconnects private, public, academic, business, and government networks across the globe. The Internet today evolved in an adhoc manner, developing technologies, protocols and standards as the network grew in size and complexity. Although The Internet has no centralized governance, each participating network sets up its own policies and some of the technical standardization is handled by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants.
This chapter will focus on the social effects of digital networks in combination with cultures that support "free" and "open" information systems as core aspects of the rapid growth and complexity of The Internet.
In 2026, the Internet is both an open technical system and a highly platformed cultural environment. We still rely on shared protocols, packet switching, domain names, and network standards, but much of everyday online life now happens through large platforms, cloud services, recommendation systems, and mobile apps. Understanding the Internet means understanding both the open network underneath and the platforms built on top of it.
3.1
Networks
(the arrangements of links or nodes in a communication network)
A network is defined as “an interconnected or interrelated chain, group, or system.” Although the science of networks is several hundred years old, it is in the age of electric (high speed) communications that the study of the interaction and behavior of complex relational data emerges. Complex networks such as telecommunication networks, computer networks, cognitive networks, and social networks all share distinct characteristics and emergent behavior. Networks are made up of individual nodes and the links that connect these nodes. A node with a greater than average amount of links in the network, is called a hub and often has the role of linking other nodes. Because networks contain multiple and divergent pathways between nodes, they exhibit nonlinearity, decentralization, interconnectedness and interdependence.
In a random network, new nodes attach themselves to a random node in the network, creating an unpredictable branching structure. In a small-world network, a controlled mathemetical graph makes it so that any node can be reached from any other node in a small number of steps. In a scale-free network, new nodes attach to hubs —nodes with the most connection to the other nodes. A scale-free network has the tendency to grow by favoring the already more active nodes. For example, Google and Facebook have grown exponentially to be such dominant hubs on the web, because anyone who goes online will want to use the services that everyone else seems to be using. In a random network, a new node will link itself to just a random node. And in a small-world network, nodes follow strict algorithms for linking.
The network effect in scale-free networks favors the growth of already popular nodes. This can seem to result in "the rich getting richer." However, active hubs can be rejected if they fail as connectors or if a better more active hub emerges. MySpace lost its dominant role as an online social network, because Facebook had more to offer as a hub for social interaction. In this case, the network effect was negative for MySpace and positive for Facebook.
Networks distribute communication across many connected nodes rather than requiring one central path or authority. This makes decentralization possible, but it does not mean that every node remains equally important. Through the network effect, some nodes can become highly connected hubs. This tension between distributed networks and concentrated hubs will become important when we look at search engines and platforms later in the chapter.
3.2
A Network of Networks
The Internet grew out of the efforts to connect the local computer networks of remote research institutions; to build a “network of networks” for the sharing of data and scientific research. The funding for this initial work came from the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense and the result was ARPANET.
Key Stages of Internet Growth
ARPANET: an early packet-switched network that connected research institutions and helped establish technologies and ideas that later became part of the Internet. On October 29, 1969, the first ARPANET message was sent from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute.
A Packet Network: unlike the telephone system's circuit network, where each conversation has a dedicated circuit, information on the Internet is broken into smaller packets. Routers direct those packets through interconnected networks toward their destination, where the data is reassembled.
Internet Protocol (IP): Internet Protocol provides a common system for addressing and routing packets across networks. An IP address identifies a device or destination so information can be sent to the right place.
TCP/IP: a foundational family of protocols that allows independently operated computers and networks to exchange data. The importance of TCP/IP is not just technical: shared protocols let many different systems participate in the same global network without one company owning the whole system.
Email: electronic mail became one of the earliest widely used Internet services. Modern email uses a store-and-forward model: servers accept, store, forward, and deliver messages, allowing communication to be rapid but asynchronous.
World Wide Web: the Web emerged later as a system of linked documents and media that runs on top of the Internet. Web browsers and servers use Internet infrastructure to exchange pages, images, video, and other media.
The Internet Is Not the Web
The Internet is the underlying network infrastructure: computers, servers, routers, cables, wireless connections, addresses, and protocols. The World Wide Web is one system that uses that infrastructure. Email, messaging, streaming, online games, cloud services, and the Web all operate through the Internet.
The next chapter looks closely at the Web, hyperlinks, and hypertext. Here, the focus is the network underneath them.
Networked Media: as Internet connections became faster, images, sound, video, software, and other complex media could move easily between many users and locations. Digital media became not only reproducible and editable, but rapidly distributable. Sharing became a basic condition of network culture.
The Internet Is Physical
Cloud Computing: digital information may seem to exist "in the cloud," but cloud services depend on physical infrastructure. Data and software are stored and processed in data centers filled with servers and connected by fiber-optic cables, routers, switches, and electrical systems.
Content Delivery Networks: a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, copies popular content across servers in different locations so that websites, images, and video can be delivered from a server closer to the user. The Internet can feel immediate even though information is moving through many layers of physical infrastructure.
Local Networks Connect to Larger Networks
A home, school, or workplace has its own local network. A router connects that local network to an Internet Service Provider (ISP), which connects it to other networks. The Internet emerges from these independently operated networks exchanging data with one another.
3.3
Protocols and Platforms
Protocols are shared rules that allow independent computers, devices, and networks to communicate. The Internet works because different machines can follow common standards for addressing, routing, requesting, sending, and receiving information. This interoperability allows independently owned systems to communicate without requiring one company to own or control the whole network.
Common Internet Protocols
HTTP and HTTPS allow web browsers and servers to exchange web pages and data. DNS, or the Domain Name System, translates human-readable names such as example.com into numerical IP addresses. SMTP helps send email between servers. TCP/IP helps break information into packets, route those packets, and reassemble them at their destination.
Finding Things in a Growing Network
As networks grow, connection creates a new problem: discovery. Early Internet users relied on directories, recommendations, links, and community lists to find information. Search engines automated this process by indexing enormous numbers of webpages and ranking results. Search therefore became more than a convenience: it became a powerful hub between users and the wider network.
This raises a network question: what happens when one highly connected hub becomes the main way people find the rest of a decentralized network?
From Protocols to Platforms
Protocols make communication possible, but platforms organize much of that communication. A protocol is a shared rule system. A platform is a managed environment where users create accounts, upload content, communicate, search, buy, sell, watch, play, and share. Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, Amazon, and Spotify are all platforms built on top of Internet protocols.
The open protocols of the Internet allow many people and organizations to build new tools and communities. Platforms, however, often centralize attention and decision-making. They determine what appears in a feed, what content is recommended, what speech is moderated, what data is collected, and how creators are paid or made visible.
Open Networks and Platformed Experience
The Internet's shared protocols allow independently operated computers, services, and communities to connect. But many people now experience the Internet through privately managed apps and platforms. Search engines, social networks, marketplaces, streaming services, and app stores can become powerful hubs that organize attention and access even though the underlying network remains distributed.
This creates one of the central tensions of Internet culture: an open network can support closed or highly centralized environments. The early Web's personal sites, forums, and independent communities offer one historical example of more decentralized publishing; the next chapter looks more closely at the Web and hyperlinks themselves.
3.4
Free vs. Open Source
The openness of the Internet does not mean that everything built on the Internet is open. Increasingly, people access the network through privately owned platforms, apps, cloud services, and devices that determine what users can see, share, modify, or control. This creates one of the central tensions of digital culture: an open network can support closed systems. The movements for free software, open source, open access, and Creative Commons emerged from a different vision—one in which users should be able not only to access information and software, but also to understand, share, modify, and build upon it.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. ... On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." - Stewart Brand at a hacker's conference in 1984
Valuable information often depends on labor, expertise, and infrastructure, yet digital networks make copying and distribution extraordinarily inexpensive. This creates a persistent tension: creators and institutions may need ways to support the production of information, while culture and knowledge often gain value by circulating, being discussed, and being reused.
The expression "information wants to be free" became associated with technology activists who argued for greater access to software, data, culture, and public knowledge. Networks make sharing technically easy, but technical possibility is not the same as legal permission or equal access. Copyright, licenses, connectivity, cost, censorship, and platform rules all shape what people can actually access, copy, modify, and redistribute.
Creativity and the Law
Public Domain: The public domain is all creative works that do not have exclusive intellectual property rights because they have either been expired, forfeited or waived. These works can be remixed and distributed without liability. Google can search for public domain media, but some sites provide access to collections of public domain works: archive.org, retrofilmvault.com, https://www.gutenberg.org/
Fair Use: Fair Use is a belief that anyone—but especially artists, scholars, critics and journalists—should be allowed to sample portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism. Without this freedom, copyright owners could take away freedom of speech. Legally, however, a copyright owner may challenge this notion in court.
Creative Commons: Larry Lessig founded Creative Commons to "expand the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share." The site provides free copyright-licenses to the public to use as labels on their creations.
The Free Software Movement, the Open Source Movement, and Hacker Culture overlap around access, sharing, experimentation, and the ability to understand or modify technological systems, but they are not identical. Free software emphasizes user freedom; open source emphasizes openly available code and licenses that allow modification and redistribution; hacker culture emphasizes curiosity, access, and creative problem-solving. Together, these traditions helped shape the Internet's culture of participation and sharing.
The Free Software Movement
“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis. from gnu.org
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this..
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2)
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The Open Source Movement
Open source does not simply mean that source code can be viewed. Open-source licenses are designed to let people use, study, modify, and redistribute software. In practice, the central ideas include:
- Source code is available so people can understand how the software works.
- Modification is allowed so people can adapt or improve the software.
- Redistribution is allowed so original or modified versions can be shared.
- Open licenses preserve these permissions rather than making each new user negotiate access individually.
See the full Open Source Definition for the formal licensing criteria.
Open Source and Innovation
Hacker Culture
Hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming limitations of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes. The defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed, but the manner in which they are done — playful, exploratory, and meaningful. This culture originally emerged in academia during the 1960s around MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club and AI Laboratory, with early examples including student pranks that demonstrated technical cleverness. Hackers strongly differentiate themselves from "crackers" — those who exploit security weaknesses for malicious purposes.
Central to hacker culture is the notion of "hack value": the sense that something is worth doing because of its finesse or cleverness. Picking a difficult lock has hack value; smashing it does not. Using things in unexpected ways — a dot matrix printer producing music, an optical mouse reading barcodes — exemplifies this spirit.
- Access to computers and anything that might teach you about the world should be unlimited and total.
- All information should be free.
- Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
- You can create art and beauty on a computer.
- Computers can change your life for the better.
Aaron Swartz
Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American programmer, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist who helped develop RSS, Markdown, Creative Commons, and the web framework web.py, and co-founded Reddit. A passionate advocate for open access to information, Swartz was federally prosecuted in 2011 for downloading millions of academic articles from the JSTOR database — charges that carried up to 35 years in prison. He died by suicide at 26, two years into the legal battle. The documentary below tells his story.
Open Source and AI
Open source culture continues to shape contemporary digital technology, including artificial intelligence. Programming languages such as Python, operating systems such as Linux, open software libraries, shared datasets, public code repositories, and communities of developers all contribute to the development of AI systems. Some AI models and tools are released openly so that researchers, artists, educators, and programmers can study, modify, and build with them.
At the same time, AI complicates the older ideals of free and open information. Open models can support education, creativity, and transparency, but they can also raise questions about copyright, labor, privacy, bias, and misuse. The debates around open source AI show that the Internet's early values of sharing and access remain powerful, but they must be reconsidered in a world of large-scale data and machine learning.
3.5
Unit Exercise: Seeing the Internet
- Find the IP address of your computer.
- Find your current Internet Service Provider or ISP.
- Search a random Wikipedia page.
- See live statistics of the Internet.
- Look at live maps of marine traffic.
- Visit a map that tracks wikipedia edits around the world in real time.
- Visit random streetview.
- Visit Submarine Cable Map and identify at least two undersea cables that connect continents.
- Visit Cloudflare Learning Center and find one explanation of how web traffic reaches users.
- Visit the Wayback Machine and pull up an old version of a website you use often. Note what has changed.
Discussion Questions
- Why has the Internet been described as a "network of networks"?
- What advantages do decentralized networks have over centralized systems?
- How do platforms differ from Internet protocols?
- Has the growth of major platforms strengthened or weakened the openness of the Internet?
- Should information always be free? Why or why not?
3.6
Glossary
- ARPANET: an early packet-switched computer network funded by the U.S. Department of Defense that helped establish technologies and ideas that became part of the Internet.
- CDN (Content Delivery Network): a system of distributed servers that delivers web content from locations closer to users.
- Cloud Computing: the use of remote servers and data centers to store, process, and deliver digital information and services over the Internet.
- Creative Commons: a system of copyright licenses that lets creators specify how others may use, share, and adapt their work.
- Decentralization: a network structure in which control and communication are distributed across many nodes rather than one central authority.
- DNS (Domain Name System): the system that translates human-readable domain names into numerical IP addresses.
- Free Software: software that users are free to run, study, modify, copy, and redistribute; “free” refers to liberty rather than price.
- Hacker Ethic: a culture of playful technical curiosity, openness, sharing, access, and creative problem-solving.
- Hub: a highly connected node within a network.
- Internet: a global network of interconnected computer networks that communicate using shared protocols.
- Internet Protocol (IP): a set of rules for addressing and routing packets of data across networks.
- ISP (Internet Service Provider): an organization that connects users and local networks to the Internet.
- Network: a system of connected nodes that can exchange information or resources.
- Network Effect: the tendency for a network or platform to become more useful or valuable as more people participate in it.
- Node: an individual point in a network, such as a computer, server, device, person, or website.
- Open Source: software whose source code is available for people to study, modify, and redistribute under an open license.
- Packet Switching: the process of breaking information into smaller packets that can travel across networks and be reassembled at their destination.
- Platform: a managed digital environment where users communicate, publish, search, buy, sell, watch, or share content.
- Protocol: a shared rule or standard that allows computers, devices, and networks to communicate.
- Router: a device that directs packets of data between networks on their way to a destination.
- Scale-Free Network: a network in which some nodes become much more highly connected than others, creating powerful hubs.
- TCP/IP: a foundational family of Internet protocols used to address, route, transmit, and manage data across networks.
- World Wide Web: a system of linked documents and media accessed through web browsers using Internet protocols; the Web is one service that runs on the Internet.
3.7
Bibliography
Greene, Rachel. Internet Art. Thames & Hudson, 2004.
“Internet.” Wikipedia, 30 Aug. 2019. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Internet&oldid=913188681.
Kernighan, Brian W. D Is for Digital: What a Well-Informed Person Should Know about Computers and Communications. 8/24/11 edition, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011.
“Network Theory.” Wikipedia, 7 July 2019. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network_theory&oldid=905123915.
“Scale-Free Network.” Wikipedia, 2 Sept. 2019. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scale-free_network&oldid=913650999.
“Small-World Network.” Wikipedia, 23 July 2019. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Small-world_network&oldid=907494262.
Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Knopf, 2010.
Keen, Andrew. The Internet Is Not the Answer. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015.