Internet science

In 1973 Peter T. Kirstein has established one of the first two international nodes of the Arpanet. In early 1983 Kirstein chaired the International Collaboration Board, which involved six NATO countries, served on the Networking Panel of the NATO Science Committee (serving as chair in 2001), and on Advisory Committees for the Australian Research Council, the Canadian Department of Communications, the German GMD, and the Indian Education and Research Network (ERNET) Project. He leads the Silk Project, which provides satellite-based Internet access to the Newly Independent States in the Southern Caucasus and Central Asia.

Internet science is an interdisciplinary science, which looks at all aspects of the co-evolution in the Internet networks and society and studies it. It works in the intersection of and in the gaps among a wide range of disciplines that have had to respond to the impact of the Internet on their 'home turf' and/or offer specific conceptual or methodological contributions. These include many natural sciences (e.g. complexity science, computer science, engineering, life sciences, mathematics, physics, psychology, statistics, systems and evolutionary biology), social sciences (e.g. anthropology, economics, philosophy, sociology, and political science), humanities (e.g. art, history, linguistics, literature and history) and some existing interdisciplines that cross traditional Faculty boundaries (e.g. technology, medicine, law). Professor Noshir Contractor and others have located it at the intersection of computational social science,^[1] network science, network engineering and Web science. By understanding the role of society in shaping Internet networks and being shaped by them Internet science aims to take care of the Internet in a way similar to that in which Web science aims to take care of the Web.^[2] The lingua franca in this interdisciplinary area include Internet standards and associated implementation, social processes, Internet infrastructure and policy.

There are a lot of disciplines, which support 'Internet science' using different analysis tools, designs and languages. In order to have a productive and effective dialogue between disciplines, network will have to know the incentives to make cooperation opportunities. There are three main elements of Internet science: Multidisciplinary convergence, Observability and Constructive experimentation.^[3]

The European Commission funded a Network of Excellence on Internet Science (project acronym EINS) over the period December 2011-May 2015 under the FP7 funding programme. The Network in May 2015 had 48 member universities and research organisations and 180 individual affiliate researchers. Two major international Internet science conferences^[4] were held in April 2013 and May 2015 together with an unconference at the University of Bologna in May 2014 and official workshops at international academic conferences such as Human Behavior and the Evolution of Society and international inter-governmental and multistakeholder conferences such as the 2013 ^[5] United Nations Internet Governance Forum.

Research

Significant areas of current Internet science research include:

Net neutrality

Net neutrality is the rule where Internet service providers should treat all the traffic on their networks equally. This means that companies should not slow down access or block any website content on the Web. In the United States, high-speed Internet service providers (ISPs), including AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon, have sought support for a two-tiered Internet service model.^[6]

In 2014, President Obama announced a new plan to preserve "net neutrality" and to prevent Internet service providers from blocking or slowing websites or creating different tiers of speed. He said-, "No service should be stuck in a ‘slow lane’ because it does not pay a fee," he wrote in a statement. "That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth."^[7]

Internet privacy

Internet privacy (online privacy) is an opportunity of individuals to regulate the flow of information and have access to data, which is generated during a browsing session. Moreover, internet privacy may include some risks, like phishing, pharming, spyware and malware.

Sustainability

The fact is that Google has signed two contracts with wind developers to power its data center in Finland with 100% renewable energy.^[8] Facebook's decision was to build a data center in Iowa and has helped to drive the local energy provider in order to scrap plans to build a nuclear power plant, and instead build a $2bn(£1.23bn) wind farm, which has led to the biggest single order of wind turbines on record.^[8]

Internet as a socio-technical critical infrastructure

Infrastructure provides a large range of vital services, for example an ability to move goods, people and information. Also it provides a range of vital services such as the ability to move goods, people, and information safely. It is necessary to support social life and nation's economic because it is essential that such infrastructural services continue in the face of various hazards.^[9] It concerns of the idea that infrastructural services gas, electricity, water, transport, banking are highly interconnected and mutually dependent in various complex ways,^[9] being linked both physically and through important ICT systems, in order to breakdowns quickly escalate into whole infrastructure failure.

A initial listing of datasets, analytic tools and e-Infrastructures is available in a dedicated Internet science evidence base.There is ongoing activity on the development of Internet Science curricula,^[10] initially on a postgraduate level.

Scientist Paul Otlet

A scientist Paul Otlet in the 1930s has suggested the combination of the telephone connection with a television screen. Nowadays, a lot of people are suffering to remember the world without the Internet and cannot imagine life without it, when it was nothing more than an imagination in 1934, when Paul Otlet has described what is going to be the information superhighway.^[11] Otlet was devising a plan how to combine telephone with a television in order to send and spread all the information from published works, when iPads, the Kindle and even computer screen did not exist.^[12]

Evolution of Internet science

1934: The first person who imagined a 'Radiated Library' in 1934 was Paul Otlet.

1965: Two different computers started to communicate at MIT Lincoln Lab by using a packet-switching technology.

1968: Beranek and Newman have discovered an effectiveness and final version of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) specifications.

1969: The nodes were installed by UCLA’s Network Measurement Centre, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California-Santa Barbara and University of Utah.

1972: Ray Tomlinson has introduced a network email. The Internetworking Working Group (INWG) forms to address, which afterwards needs to be established for standard protocols.

1973: The term 'Internet' was born. Also a global networking becomes a reality as the University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway), which connects to ARPANET.

1974: The first Internet Service Provider (ISP) was born with the introduction of a commercial version of ARPANET. This is also known as a 'Telenet'.

1974: Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn have published "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the design of TCP.

1976: Queen Elizabeth II sends her first e-mail.

1979: USENET forms to host news and discussion groups.

1981: The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a grant in order to demonstrate the Computer Science Network (CSNET) and afterwards to provide networking services to university computer scientists.

1982: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) arise the protocol for ARPANET.

1983: The Domain Name System (DNS) established the familiar .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int system in order to name websites.

1984: William Gibson was the first person who used the term "cyberspace."

1985: Symbolics.com, the website for Symbolics Computer Corp. in Massachusetts, was the first registered domain.

1986: The National Science Foundation’s NSFNET goes online to connected supercomputer centers at 56,000 bits per second — the speed of a typical dial-up computer modem.

1987: The number of hosts on the Internet exceeds 20,000. Cisco ships its first router.

1989: World.std.com becomes the first commercial provider of dial-up access to the Internet.

1990: Tim Berners-Lee develops HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This technology continues to have a large impact on ways how humans view and navigate the Internet in present days.

1991: CERN introduces the World Wide Web to the public.

1992: The first audio and video were distributed over the Internet. The phrase "surfing the Internet" was very popular.

1993: The number of websites reached 600 and the White House and United Nations go online.

1994: Netscape Communications was born. Microsoft created a Web browser for Windows 95.

1995: Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy began to provide Internet access.

1996: The browser war, primarily between the two major players Microsoft and Netscape, heated up.

1997: PC makers removed or hid Microsoft’s Internet software on new versions of Windows 95.

1998: The Google search engine was born and changed the way users engage with the Internet.

1999: The Netscape has been bought by AOL.

2000: The dot-com bubble bursted.

2001: A federal judge shouted down Napster.

2003. The SQL Slammer worm has spread worldwide in just 10 minutes.

2004: Facebook went online and the era of social networking began.

2005: YouTube.com has been launched.

2006: AOL changed its business model and offered the most services for free and relyied on advertising in order to generate revenue.

2009: 40th anniversary of the Internet.

2010: 400 million active users have been reached in Facebook.

2011: Twitter and Facebook played a large role in the Middle East revolts.

References