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During the past century, innovations such as the telephone and computer technology were developed in the US. In 1950s, researchers in the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) created ARPANET, a large computer network for communication within governmental organisations.⁹⁷ The US Department of Defence (DoD) took responsibility for the development of new technology to improve network communication for military purposes.⁹⁸ Accordingly, DoD also granted funds to a number of academic institutions and research companies to develop the technology for

97 ARPA is now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The name was changed in 1972.

98 At that time, it was the Cold War period and there was a fear of a nuclear attack from the Soviets.

Therefore, a network communication within DoD was created so the department could still communicate with each other in the event there was a nuclear attack and the rest of the system failed.

communication. The funded project led to the first physical communication network among four organisations in four distant locations: the BBN Corporation, New York;

the University of California at Los Angeles; the University of California at Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah.⁹⁹ The researchers also enhanced the computer network to enable connections to computers outside of the US. In 1970, communication between computers in the US and Europe was made possible by satellites.¹⁰⁰ As a result, ARPANET grew rapidly by 1981 and a number of new hosts were added every twenty days or so.

Technically, ARPANET works by transverse millions of packets switching individually; each packet carries a piece of information called datagram, which travels through a telephone line. The datagram will be reunited once the packets reach an address. This system continues until the final destination has received all the packets and forms them back into the initial information. If any packets are lost during the transfer, the originator automatically transmits them again. Nevertheless, a packet switching system is an end-to-end connection and relies on the network, which makes it difficult to join many networks together. Therefore, the researchers invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to replace the packet switching system because TCP has the ability to communicate on separate data networks and the ability to retransmit data in the same way as the packet switching system.

Vinton Cerf, Jon Postel, and Danny Cohen improved TCP for use in a larger network by splitting it into two parts called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol).¹⁰¹ TCP/IP was a connectionless-oriented protocol specifically designed for diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other in an open architecture environment. It enabled computers to communicate with each other in a network without losing direction; TCP led a message from one computer to another computer at its specific IP address. It was also approved as the only protocol used for ARPANET. The National Scientific Foundation (NSF), another organization under the

99Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Network (2 edn, Pearson Education Indochina, Bangkok 1999).

100 Milton Mueller, Ruling the Root (MIT press, Massachusetts 2002) p. 74.

101 RFC is an acronym for “Request for Comments”, which researchers, physicians, mathematicians, or anyone that has knowledge of Technology will use to publish a proposed innovation for other experts in that field to comment on, in order to improve it. TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol) was proposed for use for the first time in RFC 0793 by Jon Postel. For more information about TCP, See RFC 0793 - Transmission Control Protocol' <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc793.html> (6/12/2008).

US government, was also interested in this protocol and requested that only TCP/IP be used in its network;¹⁰² later, this network became the backbone of NSFNET.¹⁰³

ARPANET had been used for several years and was funded by the US government for non-commercial purposes, including academic research and military use. However, the connections increased and some commercial and academic institutions participated in providing services for computers using ARPANET.¹⁰⁴ The technology of networking spread to many organisations which then built their own networks. For example, the Department of Energy established MFENET for magnetic fusion energy research¹⁰⁵ and NSF also developed its research on an inter-network, and created NSFNET for providing connections for a number of supercomputer centres. Unlike other networks, it was announced that NSFNET would serve the entire community, regardless of commercial activities, and all qualified users would be eligible to use it.¹⁰⁶

NSF permitted commercial traffic on NSFNET in 1985 under certain conditions such pertaining to the cost and quality of services. Some of ARPANET’s servers also connected with NSFNET for commercial networks. Thus, commercialisation created many problems, consequently NSF moved to an entirely new infrastructure for the Internet.¹⁰⁷ The transition took effect in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned; this was hardly noticed because domain name registration, Internet Provider Service (ISP), and IP address assignment generated a great amount of financial interest in the network.

NSFNET’s new infrastructure could interconnect with other networks regardless of different standards and protocols and so created a large global network known as the Internet.

According to the National Research Council, the Internet is a diverse set of independent networks interlinked to provide users with the appearance of a single and uniform network.¹⁰⁸ The Internet needs Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to maintain the appearance of a uniform network by enabling users to connect smoothly to every server

102 The Internet: History of the Internet' Internet Society (ISOC)

<http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml#REK78> (4/8/2006).

103 NSFNET is National Science Foundation Network which was researched and developed by the US National Science Foundation.

104 History of the Internet' Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet> (7/12/2008).

105 The Internet: History of the Internet' .

106 The British Janet also explicitly announced the idea to use its network serving all purposes.

107 Mueller, Ruling the Root 106.

108 The National Research Council, Signposts in Cyberspace: The Domain Name System and Internet Navigation (the National Academies Press, Washington D.C. 2006) p. 20.

and node. An ISP’s task involves the hierarchy of hosts and servers which will be discussed in the next section: development of domain names