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[woosh]
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[ding]
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[buildup sound]
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[music]
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What is the internet?
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The internet is like a popular thing.
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Some satellites up there.
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I picture it in my head with like waves of
internet going to the phone.
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Somebody told me a cloud once.
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The internet is a lot like plumbing it's always moving.
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Most people don't have any idea where
the internet came from and
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doesn't matter, they don't need to. It's
sort of like asking who invented the
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ballpoint pen,
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or the flush toilet
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or the zipper.
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These are all things we just use every
day we don't even think about the fact
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that one day somebody invented them.
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So the internet is just like that. Many,
many years ago in the early 1970s
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my partner Bob Kahn and I began working on the design of what we now call the internet.
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It was a result of another experiment called the ARPANET
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which stood for Advanced Research Project Agency Network. It was a Defense
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Department research project.
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Paul Baran was trying to figure out how to build a
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communication system that might actually survive a nuclear attack.
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So he had this idea of breaking messages
up into blocks and sending them as fast
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as possible in every possible direction
through the mesh network.
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[whoosh]
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So we built what eventually became a nationwide
experimental packet network,
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and it worked.
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[electronic music with heavy beats]
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Is anybody in charge of the internet?
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The government controls it.
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Elves, obviously elves!
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The people to control the Wi-Fi
because then no Wi-Fi, no internet.
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T-mobile, um, Xfinity,
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Bill Gates
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[pause]
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Right?!
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The honest answer is well nobody and maybe another answer is everybody.
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The real answer is that the internet is
made up of an incredibly large number of
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independently operated networks.
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What's interesting about the system is
that it's fully distributed. There's no
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central control that is deciding how packets are routed or where pieces of the network are built
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or even who interconnects with whom.
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These are all business decisions that
are made independently by the operators.
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They are all motivated to assure that
there is end-to-end connectivity of
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every part of the network because the
utility of the net is that any device
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can communicate with any other device;
just like you want to be able to make
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phone calls to any other telephone in
the world.
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There's nothing like this that has ever
been built before.
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The idea that what you know might be useful to somebody else
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or vice versa is a very powerful motivator
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for sharing information.
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By the way that's how science gets done,
people share information.
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So this is an opportunity for people to
think up new applications,
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maybe program them as apps on a mobile phone,
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maybe become part of the continued
growth of the infrastructure of the
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network to bring it to people who don't
have access to it yet; or just make use
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of it on a day-to-day basis.
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You can't escape from contact with the
internet so why not get to know it and
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use it.
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[swirling sound effect]
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[ding]