No one owns it. And no one in particular actually runs it. Yet more than half a billion people rely on it as they do a light switch.
The Internet is a network whose many incarnations -- as obscure academic playpen, information superhighway, vast marketplace, sci-fi-inspired matrix -- have seen it through more than three decades of ceaseless evolution.
In the mid-1990s, a handful of doomsayers predicted that the Internet would melt down under the strain of increased volume. They proved to be false prophets, yet now, as it enters its 33rd year, the Net faces other challenges.
The demands and dangers -- sudden, news-driven traffic, security holes, and a clamor for high-speed access to homes -- are concerns that bear no resemblance to those that preoccupied the Internet's creators. For all their genius, they failed to see what the Net would become once it left the confines of the university and entered the free market.
Those perils are inextricably linked to what experts consider the Internet's biggest promise: evolving into an information utility as ubiquitous and accessible as electricity. That, too, was not foreseen by most of the engineers and computer scientists who built the Net in the 1960s and '70s.
Ten years ago, at the end of 1991, the same year that the World Wide Web was put in place but a good two or three years before the term Web browser became part of everyday speech, the Net was home to some 727,000 hosts, or computers with unique Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses. By the end of 2001, that number had soared to 175 million, according to estimates by Matrix Net Systems, a network measurement business in Austin, Texas.
For all that growth, the Net operates with surprisingly few hiccups, 24 hours a day -- and with few visible signs of who is responsible for keeping it that way. There are no vans with Internet Inc logos at the roadside, no workers in Cyberspace hard hats hovering over manholes.
Such is yet another of the Internet's glorious mysteries. No one really owns the Net, which, as most people know by now, is actually a sprawling collection of networks owned by various telecommunications carriers. The largest, known as backbone providers, include WorldCom, Verizon, Sprint and Cable & Wireless USA.
What, then, is the future of this vital public utility? Who determines it? And who is charged with carrying it out?
For the Internet's first 25 years, the US government ran parts of it, financed network research and in some cases paid companies to build custom equipment to run the network. But in the mid-1990s the Net became a commercial enterprise, and its operation was transferred to private carriers. In the process, most of the government's control evaporated.
Now the network depends on the cooperation and mutual interests of the telecommunications companies. Those so-called backbone providers adhere to what are known as peering arrangements, which are essentially agreements to exchange traffic at no charge.
"Peering fits right in with the overly loose way the Internet is provided," said Scott Bradner, a senior technical consultant at Harvard University, "which is unrelated commercial interests doing their own thing."
Bradner, co-director of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an international self-organized group of network designers, operators and researchers who have set technical standards for the Internet since the late 1980s, said that peering remains a remarkably robust mechanism.
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