To understand why the internet is so important, and how it represents a revolution in communications, consider the telephone system. It was a closed network and a centralised one. The phone company—usually a state-run monopoly, like the old BT—metered every call through its switching centre, and billed them based on duration and distance. Any new feature, from touch-tone dialling to call forwarding, had to be accepted and put in place by the company. There was little incentive to innovate—especially if it might disrupt the status quo.
The internet overthrew this model of communications. It does not have a central organisation overseeing things. As a quilt of interconnected, privately owned networks (ergo “inter-net”), the system was designed simply to carry data without regard to its content, be it a web page, phone call or song. It is open, in that it permits anyone to unleash new services to the world without asking for permission. Because of this, people pay for access based on the amount of bandwidth they use, rather than the specific things they do. If the internet worked on the telecoms model, every email would be individually charged according to its destination and the length of the message.
This decentralisation and openness is a stimulus to innovation. Because the network doesn’t need to adhere to the interests of any one organisation, there is nothing to prevent new services cropping up. These things emerge from anywhere, be it the web (invented by a Brit in Geneva) or instant messaging (popularised by an Israeli firm), to Napster (created by a teenager in California). It can even challenge the existing powers—the price of phone calls fell so fast recently because competition came from calls routed through the net.
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