Internet science is an interdisciplinary science that examines all aspects of the co-evolution in Internet networks and society. It works in the intersection of and in the gaps among a wide range of disciplines that have had to respond to the impact of the Internet on their 'home turf' and/or offer specific conceptual or methodological contributions. These include many natural sciences (e.g., complexity science, computer science, engineering, life sciences, mathematics, physics, psychology, statistics, systems and evolutionary biology), social sciences (e.g. anthropology, economics, philosophy, sociology, and political science), humanities (e.g., art, history, linguistics, literature and history) and some existing interdisciplines that cross traditional Faculty boundaries (e.g., technology, medicine, law). Professor Noshir Contractor and others have located it at the intersection of computational social science,[1]network science, network engineering and Web science. By understanding the role of society in shaping Internet networks and being shaped by them Internet science aims to take care of the Internet in a way similar to that in which Web science aims to take care of the Web.[2] The lingua franca in this interdisciplinary area include Internet standards and associated implementation, social processes, Internet infrastructure and policy.
Many disciplines support Internet science with different analysis tools, designs, and languages. To have a productive and effective dialogue between disciplines requires incentives for cooperation. The three main elements of Internet science are: multidisciplinary convergence, observability and constructive experimentation.[3]
The European Commission funded a Network of Excellence on Internet Science (project acronym EINS) over the period December 2011-May 2015 under the FP7 funding programme. The Network in May 2015 had 48 member universities and research organisations and 180 individual affiliate researchers. Two major international Internet science conferences[4] were held in April 2013 and May 2015 together with an unconference at the University of Bologna in May 2014 and official workshops at international academic conferences such as Human Behavior and the Evolution of Society and international inter-governmental and multistakeholder conferences such as the 2013 [5] United Nations Internet Governance Forum.
Research
Significant areas of current Internet science research include:
Net neutrality
Net neutrality is the rule where Internet service providers should treat all the traffic on their networks equally.[6] This means that companies should not slow down access or block any website content on the Web. In the United States, high-speed Internet service providers (ISPs), including AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon, have sought support for a two-tiered Internet service model.[7]
In 2014, President Obama announced a new plan to preserve "net neutrality" and to prevent Internet service providers from blocking or slowing websites or creating different tiers of speed. He said-, "No service should be stuck in a ‘slow lane’ because it does not pay a fee," he wrote in a statement. "That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth."[8]
Internet privacy
Internet privacy (online privacy) is an opportunity of individuals to regulate the flow of information and have access to data, which is generated during a browsing session.
Google has signed two contracts with wind developers to power its data center in Finland with 100% renewable energy.[9] Facebook decided to build a data center in Iowa, and has helped drive the local energy provider to scrap plans to build a nuclear power plant, and instead build a $2bn(£1.23bn) wind farm, which has led to the biggest single order of wind turbines on record.[9]
Internet as a socio-technical critical infrastructure
Infrastructure provides a large range of vital services—such as the ability to move goods, people, and information.[10] Infrastructural services like gas, electricity, water, transport, and banking are highly interconnected and mutually dependent in various complex ways.[10] They are linked physically, and through important ICT systems, to prevent breakdowns from escalating into whole infrastructure failure.
There is ongoing activity on the development of Internet Science curricula,[11] initially on a postgraduate level.
Evolution of Internet science
1934: The first person who imagined a 'Radiated Library' in 1934 was Paul Otlet.
1965: Two different computers started to communicate at MIT Lincoln Lab.
1968:Beranek and Newman have discovered an effectiveness and final version of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) specifications.
1974: The first Internet Service Provider (ISP) was born with the introduction of a commercial version of ARPANET. This is also known as a 'Telenet'.
1974:Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn have published "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the design of TCP.
1976: Queen Elizabeth II sends her first e-mail.
1979: USENET forms to host news and discussion groups.
1981: The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a grant to demonstrate the Computer Science Network (CSNET) and afterwards to provide networking services to university computer scientists.
1983: The Domain Name System (DNS) established the familiar .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int system to name websites.
1984:William Gibson was the first person who used the term "cyberspace."
1985: Symbolics.com, the website for Symbolics Computer Corp. in Massachusetts, was the first registered domain.
1986: The National Science Foundation's NSFNET goes online to connected supercomputer centers at 56,000 bits per second — the speed of a typical dial-up computer modem.
1987: The number of hosts on the Internet exceeds 20,000. Cisco ships its first router.
1989: World.std.com becomes the first commercial provider of dial-up access to the Internet.
1990:Tim Berners-Lee develops HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This technology continues to have a large impact on ways how humans view and navigate the Internet in present days.
2003. The SQL Slammer worm has spread worldwide in just 10 minutes.
2004: Facebook went online and the era of social networking began.
2005: YouTube.com has been launched.
2006: AOL changed its business model and offered the most services for free and relied on advertising to generate revenue.
2009: 40th anniversary of the Internet.
2010: 400 million active users have been reached in Facebook.
2011: Twitter and Facebook played a large role in the Middle East revolts.
Related Research Articles
The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
Netscape Navigator is a discontinued proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its user base had all but disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s.
The World Wide Web is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
NCSA Mosaic was among the first widely available web browsers, instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. Mosaic was the first browser to display images inline with text.
The Internet backbone is the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected computer networks and core routers of the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity network centers as well as the Internet exchange points and network access points, which exchange Internet traffic internationally. Internet service providers (ISPs) participate in Internet backbone traffic through privately negotiated interconnection agreements, primarily governed by the principle of settlement-free peering.
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned.
This page provides an index of articles thought to be Internet or Web related topics.
Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used for baselining application behavior, analyzing network usage, troubleshooting network performance, ensuring that data is in the correct format, checking for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.
A dark net or darknet is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social networks, and anonymity proxy networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.
The CYCLADES computer network was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was one of the pioneering networks experimenting with the concept of packet switching and, unlike the ARPANET, was explicitly designed to facilitate internetworking.
Push technology, also known as server Push, refers to a communication method, where the communication is initiated by a server rather than a client. This approach is different from the "pull" method where the communication is initiated by a client.
Tim Howes is a software engineer, entrepreneur and author. He is the co-creator of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the Internet standard for accessing directory servers. He co-founded enterprise software company Opsware, internet browser company Rockmelt, and children's education company, Know Yourself. He has co-authored two books, several Internet RFCs, and holds several patents.
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies.
The World Wide Web is a global information medium that users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
The NPL network, or NPL Data Communications Network, was a local area computer network operated by a team from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London that pioneered the concept of packet switching.
The commercialization of the Internet encompasses the creation and management of online services principally for financial gain. It typically involves the increasing monetization of network services and consumer products mediated through the varied use of Internet technologies. Common forms of Internet commercialization include e-commerce, electronic money, and advanced marketing techniques including personalized and targeted advertising. The effects of the commercialization of the Internet are controversial, with benefits that simplify daily life and repercussions that challenge personal freedoms, including surveillance capitalism and data tracking. This began with the National Science Foundation funding supercomputing center and then universities being able to develop supercomputer sites for research and academic purposes.
References
↑ Lazer, D.; Pentland, A.; Adamic, L.; Aral, S.; Barabasi, A. -L.; Brewer, D.; Christakis, N.; Contractor, N.; Fowler, J.; Gutmann, M.; Jebara, T.; King, G.; Macy, M.; Roy, D.; Van Alstyne, M. (2009). "SOCIAL SCIENCE: Computational Social Science". Science 323 (5915): 721–723
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