In January 1989, two Engineers sat down in the cafeteria at a technology conference in Texas, USA. The two men were looking to work out a shot term fix to help address problems with the way data flowed across the internet which at the time connected about 100,000 computers across the world.
In the spirit of finding a fudge, they scribbled a new protocol across either two or three napkins. This protocol was adopted as the new standard for determining which physical routes data would take to reverse the network.
More than 25 years later, the "three napkin protocol" is still in place. But in the meantime, the internet has become a critical global infrastructure central to the business operations of many of the world's largest companies, the planet's information ecosystem and the daily behavior of about half the people on Earth.
The protocol that Kirk Laughed of CISCO and Yakov Rekhter of IBM devised known as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in their lunch break was far better than either realised, but it isn't what you would design for a secure global network that we all rely on.
In one famous example, Pakistani authorities looked to block a YouTube video they had deemed offensive and ordered their internet providers to do this. One company did so by using BGP to direct anyone looking for YouTube in Pakistan to a dead end. No one had hacked or damaged YouTube, but no one was directed towards it. Unfortunately, this new route to YouTube wasn't restricted only to this firm's users; the Pakistani internet provider recommended it's new route across the world, taking down YouTube for millions of users.
This is just a single example of what happened with one protocol. Users can be misdirected, intercepted, blocked and put at risk by numerous vulnerabilities built into the creaking infrastructure of the internet, and efforts to fix it are painfully and dangerously slow.
The internet turned 50 last year. For its first two decades, it grew slowly between institutions that already knew and trusted each other, then exploded through the 1990s and beyond to what we have today. The opportunity to retool the network, if it ever existed wasn't taken. We can't rebuild from scratch, we have to fix what we have.
One of the biggest challenges in doing so is that the internet is largely operated by consent and by slow consensus. There is no overseeing authority, no one setting global laws. Our lives, our data, our communications and our physical infrastructure are moving online. The best time to decide who runs the internet was decades ago. The second best time is now!!!
Nice