What is the Internet?

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Let me ask the question in the title then: What is the Internet? You use it, I know, because you are reading this article on Bianet. E-mails, messages, voices, photos... There is a place for the internet in your life. But when it comes to explaining it, what can you say about it?

That's why when Bianet asked me to write an article based on the definition of the internet, I put my head between my hands and seriously thought about this topic. How can I explain what the internet is without falling into the same analogical mistakes that have gone on for almost 20 years, or by creating misconceptions just for the sake of "simplification", or bore the reader with a lot of technical terms?

These are tough questions, aren't they?

There is a quote sometimes attributed to theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, and sometimes to Albert Einstein: "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't really understand it." Therefore the burden on my shoulders is heavy and I have a only few minutes of your attention. Best not to lose any time then...

QUESTION #1: HOW MUCH DO WE KNOW?

Let us begin with a fact that solidifies its presence with every passing day: We love the digital world. We love to communicate there, to conduct business, to spark our curiosity, to have a laugh, and even sometimes get frustrated on purpose. You can find a lot of statistics in the box in this article, but all you need to do is check the people around you. People always have smartphones in their hands, they are always on computers in cafes, and little children all have tablets; all scroll down screens instead of having meaningful conversations. All of those devices are connected to the internet, one way or another.

But what do we know about the internet, which is a crucial part of our lives now? We send e-mails for personal or business purposes, and we send messages or voice recordings on WhatsApp. We pour out our thoughts on social media. We entrust our private photos to companies that we know nothing about. Although this system is integrated this much into our lives, why is it such a mystery to us?

As of April 2017, there are more than 1.8 billion users on Facebook and that makes Facebook the biggest social network out there

QUESTION #2: SHOULD WE KNOW ANYTHING?

Imagine that you have a family with children and you move to another city. You probably check the quality of schools, the type of communities, and the establishments nearby such as the markets, pharmacies, hospitals, and the transportation for the area. Does the neighborhood have functional playgrounds for your children? Does it have safe routes for them to come home from school? Are there any shopping centers nearby? Any pharmacies? Don't be shy, add more questions about the place you are going to live.

But when it comes to the internet, we choose not to be informed or aware. The internet is usually "complicated" or sometimes it's "crazy stuff"". We prefer that "something happens,", but we avoid the "how" part most of the time.

In 2011, Binali Yıldırım, Turkey's minister of transportation at that time and responsible for the internet systems, tried to explain "cloud computing" to people and it got weird. Really weird. "There is something called 'the cloud,', everyone throws something on there and then they get what they want. That's how I understand it..." That was the beginning of the speech and it was full of holes technically. Honestly, it's hard to watch it and try not to smile or say "What is he talking about?" if you know even a little bit about the internet

It is often easy to laugh at other people's mistakes. But when it comes to us, are we equipped enough to approach to the subject on a whole different manner? Are we really sure that we can outperform the minister of transportation in 2011, who is Turkey's prime minister in 2017, in terms of explaining the internet?

QUESTION #3: WHAT IS THE INTERNET?

The definition of the internet is actually begins with the definition of the word. Internet is the shortened version of "internetworking". The definition is simple: internetworking means connecting different networks. Of course, the internet didn't magically appear, and we need to learn how to walk before learning how to run. And that takes us to a short story that begins in the 1960s.

Before the internet becomes "the internet", it began as a military project much like many other technological endeavors. ARPANET, which was first a concept and then a practical approach to a new communications system for the USA in case of a nuclear warfare, was created at the end of 1960s. Although the history of transporting digital data packages goes way back before 1968, the internet is not just about transporting packages.

ARPANET (which would also sometimes be known as DARPANET in the future) was a fairly simple version of the today's internet. Yes, it brought different local networks together but the number of networks was limited (approximately 4), and these "networks" were mostly solitary computers. ARPANET was an accomplishment nonetheless as an early concept of the internet. Years passed and ARPANET evolved into other systems like NSFNET or SIRPNET. In the end the concept of connecting networks went beyond the military world and universities got the idea of connecting their databases throughout the country.

Of course, since the internet began with military intentions, it's hard to pinpoint who worked where and which parties were involved; in short, it's hard to know the complete truth. We know some names, like Leonard Kleinrock, who was the father of the internetworking concept, and J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, who are known as the people behind ARPANET. But besides the papers they published, we are not sure about their total involvement, nor about which teams participated. Since the end of 1960s and ARPANET (and other militaristic systems) are not as transparent as civil projects, keeping track of the following years and civil systems is much easier.

At the beginning of 1970s, Anton Nerf and Robert Kahn began working on one of the most crucial protocols of the internet: TCP. But the time between "beginning" and "finishing" is vast, and there were also many other technical problems to solve. For example, the "modem" technology that we use to connect was made public in 1977.

But the importance of 1977 is not solely based on the modem. The name "internet" and the first official test of TCP/IP happened in this year. By the way, TCP/IP is still a crucial part of the internet protocols even in 2017. With great effort from Stanford University, the test aimed at connecting different types of networks together. Therefore the name "internetworking" was born, which then evolved into "the internet". But it took another year to make the system standardized and sustainable. In 1978 the world understood the importance and functionality of TCP/IP as well just as it saw the first small but working internet system. I am exaggerating a little of course, most people had no idea what was going on other than the researchers.

To make all these technical terms more understandable: The test conducted in 1977 was like getting an English speaker, a Russian speaker and a Mandarin speaker together at a table and making them communicate with translators. But in 1978, TCP/IP allowed the words to transform into a unified language just after they came out of the speaker's mouth. This allowed localized networks to communicate with each other even if they were based on different foundations and used different languages.

The history of the internet indeed continues after 1978. The first ISPs (Internet Service Providers) emerged in 1980s. The concept of the WWW, HTML, and the first graphic web browser Mosaic were all born in 1990s. But the evolution of internet still continues, even as you are reading this article. So let's stop looking at the past and focus on the present.

The transfer of data is actually using small voltage differences for the 0's and 1's and send that differences through the cable

QUESTION #4: WHAT IS THE INTERNET OF TODAY LOOKS LIKE?

The internet is nowadays a codename for the digital world, that we use for many purposes. Actually it still performs as intended in the early days, meaning connections different independent networks (or systems) together. So as a concept, as well as getting new objectives, the internet is true to its roots.

There is a misuse in there by the way: "The Internet" is an infrastructure. That means it's the technical part. It is the concept that we connect to, but there is no content included. It is vague and empty. The content that we are connecting to is "the world wide web", albeit WWW. One is the underwork, the other one is the service which uses that underwork. The websites, as an example bianet.org, is not the internet. That is a website provided to you on the facilities of the internet. Website is a content. When you combine the infrastructure and the content, it forms a big system.

But how this system works? Where does everything we write, send and say go?

Actually the answer is simple: To the servers.

Server is basically just another computer. It's not a computer like our desktop or laptop of course. It's a specialized computer, for example it can remain open for days. It doesn't have the graphical interface and little icons you click with your mouse like you used to. The purpose of these computers are to be a part of the internet infrastructure and provide the user with every content, website, service.

The act of connecting from our local network (our devices) to the servers far away is because of the internet. But as I've said above, the internet has gathered more functions along the way. It has its core function (connecting us to the server, meaning to the data in it), as well as used as a definition on the whole integrity of the data. We usually say "the internet is down" when an access attempt is unsuccessful, therefore the integrity is compromised. The internet connects your network and another one, also connects millions of users to other servers. As well as connecting all these servers together. Lots of responsibility for just one word, don't you think?

Servers are computers, but nothing like the ones in your houses. Every drawer contains a part of the digital world

QUESTION #5: HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS?

The internet is actually similar to asking a person something. Let's say that you are walking on the street and you are curious about the time. You don't have a wristwatch and your phone is dead. You find someone waiting for a bus, and say "Hello, you have a watch?" The other person understands that you are not actually asking whether she has a watch or not, but that you're asking for the time. She checks her watch, process that data in her brain, then tells you "It's 14:16". After that, to acknowledge the information exchange, you either smile, say thanks or nod. Then you carry on walking.

Now let's adapt this example for the digital world. When you live in Turkey you wonder what time it is in New York, USA. You open up your computer, start your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc.). After using one of many ways, you end up on a search engine (Google, Yandex, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.). You write "time new york". Your computer forwards this request through the internet to a (let's say) Google server, somewhere around the globe. The server recognizes your computer through its connection number, and thus it verifies you as an actual person (as "Hello"). Then it gets the request and through computing, it understands that you are asking about the local time in New York. Google's servers begin working on it (in a sense, they are "looking at the watch"). When it gets the answer, it forwards the webpage to you through the internet. After that, your computer sends another small data which to inform the server that it got the webpage (in other words, it says "Thank you"). Then the interaction ends and you carry on with your life.

This representation is one of the simplest ones that avoids using today's misleading terms about the internet. Even with this explanation there are numerous steps missing and there are tons of mistakes to be found. But you can apply this thinking to your smartphone or tablet and grasp the system's inner workings more easily. Your computers or your smartphones, which are themselves miniaturized computers, are not impossible riddles to solve. Everything happens in a certain order, with very basic steps.

QUESTION #6: WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS INFORMATION?

The last point that we come to is basically the most vital one. Everything that you use in the digital world uses servers. That means everything you have written, sent, or exchanged used servers. When you send a message in WhatsApp and there is only one tick, that means the message is waiting in the server to be transferred. When the recipient has a connection again, the message is then forwarded. Every e-mail you've ever sent is being kept on servers as well; that is why you can access them wherever you are with your username and password. Facebook, as well, is on the servers. So is Wikipedia. Youtube, LinkedIn, Wordpress, Twitter, Instagram, Google Documents, Spotify, Apple Music, every website or service out there. All of them are on servers, which are just computers of other professional companies.

Regardless of your device or your app, every time you connect to the internet you are connecting to the servers

Every step you take, every message you send, every word you put into a search engine goes to other people's computers first, stays there and is then forwarded to other places. Servers are all around the world. Since data allocation is standard, the place you connect to also changes. You connect to Paris today to ask about the time, but tomorrow the system redirects you to Dublin, since Paris is in maintenance. It doesn't matter where the server is, how many computers are out there, how far it is from you, or which floor it is on in the building. The only thing that matters is that everything you say goes through the computers of professional companies. More importantly is that there are several copies of the data, and the fact that "deleting" something in the digital world is extremely hard.

When you "delete" something, whether it is on the server, on your computer or on your smartphone, you actually make it "inaccessible". That means the data is still there, but you cannot access it. Let's say that you have a shelf for your souvenirs and you are tired of a snow globe on the shelf. Taking the snow globe and throwing it into the trash is not "deleting" something in the digital world. What "deleting" means is, you put a picture frame in front of the snow globe and make it not visible. But whatever is blocked from view can be made visible again with the right tools. Your guests may not see the snow globe but you can take the frame away and reveal the snow globe again.

That means deleting a picture from Facebook is not actually "deleting" it from the digital world. It only makes the picture data "invisible". Facebook, under right circumstances, can access that photo in their server. Any conversation you have in WhatsApp, if you have backed it up, can be found on Facebook's servers again (because WhatsApp is owned by Facebook). The only way to delete something in the digital world is write something onto it. Using the same example, you need to get a new small statue for the shelf, and since the snow globe is occupying space, you tackle it with the statue. That means "overwriting" it. Until that time, the data can be unearthed.

Right now you may be full of questions. You may wonder about the protection of personal data, who those servers belong to, how "secure" all that information is, advertisements, whether free services really "free", and many many more. I can feel the neurons in your brain firing constantly. But in 2017, where and how we can get answers to these questions in Turkey is very similar to how vast the internet is and how it is under control by some billionaire corporations. They say that "spoken words fly away, written words remain," but if something is economically valuable, it remains until the value is zero. Therefore you need to consider this: What data is going through those company servers controlled by only a few people?

This article, which is familiar to tech-savvy people and unfortunately cumbersome to the people uninterested, has a couple of ideas to offer. But time is running fast, everybody is so busy and the daily commute is crazy. Because of these reasons, if you have time for only one outcome, let it be this: Every time you use the internet whatever you do is recorded on a computer that belongs to someone else. For a common user, even if it is sometimes protected, every recording is, without exception,out there waiting to be examined.

Therefore think twice before taking out your smartphone or computer to use the digital world next time you need it. The pro's defeat the con's most of the time, but nevertheless the digital world can be a terrifying rabbit hole. If you want to jump in, be a little bit more prepared than Alice at least. In the end, it's not a fairy tale and you may end up in unexpected places.

Translated by Sarp Kürkçü

(SK/EKN/DG/LN)