The Internet has become such an integral part of our modern world that it’s no surprise that there are many Internet topics that have political dimensions and implications. Today I want to start a short series of articles summarizing some of the issues in each of the topics listed for the completely revised IS407 “Politics of Cyberspace” course that started in January 2011.
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The first week was devoted to introducing the course (assignments, grades and so on) and then spending about an hour walking the students, most of whom are majoring in communications, through some early history of the Internet and the World Wide Web. I have to smile when I remember an incident in 2001 (in a C++ programming course) when I casually asked the class – most of whom were born around the early 1980s – when the World Wide Web opened up for general commercial use (around 1993). To my astonishment, one earnest youngster piped up, “1928?” I spoke with my Dean and as a result of that question and answer – plus the experiences of colleagues who had encountered the same sort of lack of general knowledge about our field – we established a Foundations of Computer Science and Information Assurance course for all our computer science and information assurance majors.
In IS407’s first week, we discussed the role of DARPA in establishing the ARPANET in the late 1960s and why datagram routing was such an important aspect of the architecture of the future Internet – it was a response to the concerns about atomic warfare and attempted to route around disasters. We also introduced the concept of IPv4 address-space exhaustion due to the limited number of bits available for an IPv4 address – and compared the address space of IPv6 to that of IPv4 as equivalent to comparing the surface area of our solar system to that of a postage stamp.
The second week of the Politics of Cyberspace course introduced the issues of governance of the Internet. We looked at the history of the plain-old telephone service (POTS) and the importance of its common-carrier status. We asked who owns the Internet and discussed why we say that either no one owns it or that everyone who owns an Internet-connected device or transmission channel owns part of it.
Students watched the video clip “Warriors of the Net“, which explains the role of packets, routers, switches and firewalls with amusement and interest. We also delved into the issues of net neutrality, talking about the role of the Federal Communications Commission, and the difference between broadcasting using the public airways and narrowcasting from ISPs using only contractually approved connections. The communications majors were familiar with First Amendment provisions guaranteeing freedom from government interference in speech – except for the non-protected type of speech such as defamation, obscenity, incitement to riot, and sedition. Then we discussed the potential conflict between common-carrier status and active restriction or throttling of bandwidth allocation as a function of an ISP’s solicitation of payment from those organizations which can afford to pay for the fastest access for the public. Students talked about the implications of having ISPs potentially ending up facilitating access to ads, online ordering, news and opinion from huge organizations such as Wal-Mart, MSNBC or Fox News while slowing down access to mom ‘n’ pop online stores, blogs and personal Web sites.
Resources for the second week include links to:
• 22 transcripts and podcasts from National Public Radio’s (NPR) “On the Media” weekly broadcast (“a clear-eyed look at all media“,Spark” program (“an ongoing conversation about technology and culture”), andNPR and Democracy Now.
• 14 recordings from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “
• Several others from
More about the politics of cyberspace in the next article in this series.
