Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-Shifting Net

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: March 3, 2010 2:35:46 AM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-Shifting Net

March 1, 2010
Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-Shifting Net
By JOHN MARKOFF
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02topo.html>

SAN FRANCISCO — In a dimly lit chamber festooned with wires and hidden in one of California’s largest data centers, Tim 
Pozar is changing the shape of the Internet.

He is using what Internet engineers refer to as a “meet-me room.” The room itself is enclosed in a building full of 
computers and routers. What Mr. Pozar does there is to informally wire together the networks of different businesses 
that want to freely share their Internet traffic.

The practice is known as peering, and it goes back to the earliest days of the Internet, when organizations would 
directly connect their networks instead of paying yet another company to route data traffic. Originally, the companies 
that owned the backbone of the Internet shared traffic. In recent years, however, the practice has increased to the 
point where some researchers who study the way global networks are put together believe that peering is changing the 
fundamental shape of the Internet, with serious consequences for its stability and security. Others see the vast 
increase in traffic staying within a structure that has remained essentially the same.

What is clear is that today a significant portion of Internet traffic does not flow through the backbone networks of 
giant Internet companies like AT&T and Level 3. Instead, it has begun to cascade in torrents of data on the edges of 
the network, as if a river in flood were carving new channels.

Some of this traffic coursing through new channels passes through public peering points like Mr. Pozar’s. And some 
flows through so-called dark networks, private channels created to move information more cheaply and efficiently within 
a business or any kind of organization. For instance, Google has privately built such a network so that video and 
search data need not pass through so many points to get to customers.

By its very nature, Internet networking technology is intended to support anarchic growth. Unlike earlier communication 
networks, the Internet is not controlled from the top down. This stems from an innovation at the heart of the Internet 
— packet switching. From the start, the information moving around the Internet was broken up into so-called packets 
that could be sent on different paths to one destination where the original message — whether it was e-mail, an image 
or sound file or instructions to another computer — would be put back together in its original form. This 
packet-switching technology was conceived in the 1960s in England and the United States. It made delivery of a message 
through a network possible even if one or many of the nodes of the network failed. Indeed, this resistance to failure 
or attack was at the very core of the Internet, part of the essential nature of an organic, interconnected 
communications web with no single control point.

During the 1970s, a method emerged to create a network of networks. The connections depended on a communication 
protocol, or set of rules, known as TCP/IP, a series of letters familiar to anyone who has tried to set up their own 
wireless network at home. The global network of networks, the Internet, transformed the world, and continues to grow 
without central planning, extending itself into every area of life, fromFacebook to cyberwar.

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