“Transparency” as a Requirement for IMPs
Welcome to my blog! Here’s the Jake Gilbert elevator pitch: I’m an 18-year-old Harvard student from Long Island, New York, and I’m interested in studying computer science, government, English, and a few more things (I’m particularly interested lately in comedy). Let’s dive in…
While reading “Where Wizards Stay Up Late” by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, a few things stood out to me. I found the initial requirements for the first IMP as it was contracted to be very fascinating. A particularly relevant request was that the network be “transparent.” The book put it this way, on page 64 in Chapter 3:
“To achieve that transparency, the network was going to have to be fast, free of congestion, and extremely reliable. These were relatively straightforward requirements that Roberts had written into the request for proposals, but no one expected that actually accomplishing them would be easy”
This got me thinking; how has our definition of “transparency” on the internet changed throughout time? Do internet providers still hold an obligation to provide that transparency? When, if ever, did we lose transparency on the internet, and what did we gain through that sacrifice? Is the current fight for “net neutrality” analogous to the requirement for transparency in the young web?
Back during the origins of the internet, speed, lack of congestion, and reliability were enough to determine transparency. This is probably because that was all a transmitting host needed to be able to “look into the network through its adjacent IMP and see itself connected to the receiving host,” as the book put it. Those three factors gave a user enough knowledge to know exactly what was going on on their network; the average internet user today has very little personal knowledge regarding the inner-workings of their internet usage. Our in-class discussion about Artificial Intelligence raises some points regarding this; do Amazon, Google, Apple, etc have any obligation to their users to report exactly how and where the data collected from their voice input is used? Where do Alexa’s answers come from? Who’s hearing my voice as it’s used to build a better AI?
Transparency on the net is becoming a lost obligation as we know it. The fight for net neutrality is the greatest example of this. ISPs are currently lobbying the US government for the right to throttle internet connections for certain sites, charge more for certain services, and cap data usage at specific amounts (often on certain websites). This could create a dangerous dynamic where some have greater access to the knowledge on the internet, and some don’t. This could create a system by which ISPs can essentially hold users hostage by disallowing access to Netflix unless they pay an extra monthly fee. Does this comply with the internet’s original goal of “fast, free of congestion, and extremely reliable”? It seems the further we stray from this idea, the blurrier our idea of “transparency” for ISPs becomes.
profsmith
September 10, 2017 @ 1:47 am
Thank, Jake, for your thoughts. We’ll talk more about net neutrality later in the semester, but I’d say that that is the biggest change in “transparency” from the time of the ARPANET’s first design. Transparency then really meant invisibility and the feeling that one host was taking directly to another host without IMPs and AT&T’s lines in-between. I’d say that the network is extremely reliable today. It’s almost always some host that is causing you reliability or congestion problems today. And data collection is a fascinating topic. Again, most of the data collection that worries us today is because we’re relying on services provided by hosts out on the Internet, who ask for and retain data about us. The routers (today’s IMPs) don’t collect most of the data that concern us. Of course, the network service providers (e.g., Verizon and Comcast) can keep track of the nodes on the Internet that you visit even though they may not understand the conversation you’re having with those sites. It’s like Harvard College knowing that you spend Mondays from 1-3pm with me, but it doesn’t know what we discuss.