Appendix B
Internet explained

History

In 1977 the ARPANET connected 111 computers, and by 1985 the network had reached Europe and Australia. The Internet was becoming global and de-militarised. 1983 saw the introduction of TCP/IP version 4 – a protocol with which any computer in the world, irrespective of its make or model, could communicate with any other on the same network. This technical breakthrough is regarded as the birth of the Internet. Robert Kahn developed the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol with four basic principles:

• Network connectivity. Any network could connect to another network.
• Distribution. There would be no central network administration or control.
• Error recovery. Lost packets would be retransmitted.
• Black box design. No internal changes would have to be made to a network to connect it to other networks.

TCP/IPv4 is still the common protocol of the Internet today. Its very structure has so far ensured that no particular person or company runs the Internet, and that all who connect to the Internet are given unrestricted access to its content (we have discussed Internet censorship and filtering earlier).

The World Wide Web

• links – (hyperlinks) that connected one webpage to another
• communication – HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) - an electronic language spoken by computers on the Internet.
• webpages – HTML (hypertext markup language) used to design webpages and interact with others by means of links.Other popular languages for writing websites in are PHP and JavaScript.
• addresses – URL (universal resource locator) - an addressing system for referencing web pages and other information on the Internet.

Together they constitute the building blocks of the Internet we use today.. The communication between websites is performed by TCP/IP.

Internet Today

A significant recent example of the power of the Internet is Wikipedia.org - an online encyclopaedia, with articles written and edited by the Internet community. Within 5 years since its foundation, Wikipedia.org had over one and a half million articles in English and at least one hundred thousand in ten more languages. Its popularity lead to an independent evaluation of the accuracy of its information as compared to Encyclopaedia Britannica. The results showed that the two encyclopaedias were just about as accurate as each other.¹²³

Basic Infrastructure

The Internet is the ultimate distributed network. This means that it has no central base or server. Yet, it does apply standards to the way it operates (called protocols) and to the organisations that develop these standards. Today's Internet has 3 main layers to its operation. First, there is the telecommunications infrastructure. A collection of telephone cables, optic fibre, microwaves and satellites - all working together to ensure that Internet traffic reaches the world's every corner. The second layer are technical standards and services. It is composed of different protocols, directing the traffic around the infrastructure and allowing us to view webpages and send email. It is on this layer that we connect to the Internet. The last layer: content and applications - is where all the web pages and Internet services operate. One of the Internet's main strengths is that each of these layers operates independently ¹²⁴

Let's look at how the Internet functions from the end user's point of view. First, we need to be connected to the Internet. This can be done by creating an account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP), which in turn, purchases its own access from a national provider. National providers receive their connection from one of the multinational companies that maintain the Internet's backbone. The backbone is a high-powered and high- bandwidth structure, with global connections via underwater cables and satellites, that enables communications between countries and continents. Also known as Tier1, it is run by companies such as MCI, AT&T, Cable Wireless, and France Telecom.

When you get connected to the Internet, your computer is assigned an IP address. Like a postal address, it uniquely identifies this computer on the Internet. Depending on your Internet Service Provider, you may be assigned different IP addresses at different connection times. All web sites and web servers have an IP address.

However, when we want to visit a website, we don't request to see 217.67.142.198 but type in www.frontlinedefenders.org instead. There exists a method to translate the IP numbers into common languages names. It is called the Domain Name System (DNS), and there are dedicated computers on the Internet whose function is to perform these translations. Therefore, we don't have to burden ourselves with memorising complex number combinations, but only have to remember linguistic descriptions of the website name.

DNS relies on root servers. These are, in plain words, several chosen computers that maintain a list of the most important website names and their relevant identifiers (.COM .ORG .NET .GOV, etc.). Some of these root servers are privately owned and some are operated by US government agencies. The majority of these servers are currently located on the East Coast of the USA. The DNS structure is administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, operating under the jurisdiction of the US Department of Commerce. In effect, some of the major players (those who own and manage the root servers), like Verisign (a B private US company), have the power of veto in this ruling body – the fact that has become a contentious issue for those fearing that the US exerts too much control over the Internet.

To see a web page from your computer, you must request it by typing its website name into the URL. The Internet then finds the website IP by querying the DNS. Eventually, a path from your computer to the destination website must be found. This path could travel through countries, oceans and space; it could be thousands of miles long and could pass through numerous computers. How does it know which way to go, when there exist hundreds of millions of different websites? The task of directing your message to the website (and back) is performed by routers, and the process is known as routing. These routers can be manipulated to record or re-direct their packets or to block access to certain websites.

Example of how your message travels on the Internet when finding a webpage through Google

1. You type in www.google.com The computer looks to the DNS server to find Google's IP
2. The DNS server forwards you to www.google.com
3. You type in your search query and are given the results by Google
4. You are directed to the result page (note: it is possible that your computer will find the IP of this webpage via the DNS server again)

Every computer or router, which you go through to get to your destination, is called a hop. The number of hops is the number of computers/routers your message comes in contact with along its way. Below, is the path my computer makes on the Internet to get to www.google.com. You can see that my request will pass through at least 13 computers (hops) to get to its destination.

If you have used the Internet before, you know that, despite its seemingly complex structure, it is very easy to operate. This simplicity is the result of its stable architecture, as explained above. It allows us to quickly locate what we need in the ocean of electronic information. DNS servers and routers are responsible for coordinating this process. If someone can control or influence their operation, our use of the Internet will be damaged or restricted.

Email

Electronic email is composing electronic messages and sending them around the Internet. Anyone can register an email account on the Internet, or receive one from their ISP, and these hosts will become our email providers. Every email account has a unique address (dmitri@email.com) where the user name is separated from the provider's address by a '@'. Email is sent around the Internet following the same principles of DNS and routing. First, the email provider is found by its domain name (e.g. email.com), then the provider is queried for the existence of a particular user account (e.g. dmitri). If the information is correct, the email is delivered. If not, the email is returned (or bounced) to us with an error message.
Every email message you send or receive contains the following information:

• The name registered for the email account (e.g. dmitri vitaliev)
• The email address
• The IP number of the originating computer or email provider
• The route taken by the email to get to its destination
• The date the email was sent and received

This information is stored in email message headers and usually looks like this: