Draft The Global Internet and the Coordination Challenge by Ronda Hauben ronda@panix.com In his article "Globalization of the Internet", Barry Leiner writes, "Packet switching technology has been an international activity from its very inception." (Globalization, p16) Leiner points to the conceptual contributions of Donald Davies at the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory, Paul Baran at Rand, and the experimental development of the ARPANET led by Larry Roberts at ARPA. Such research on computer communications sparked the first International Computer Communications Conference (ICCC '72) in Washington, D.C. where researchers from a number of countries around the world discussed their interest in the promise of packet switching and computer networking. (1) It was at this conference that Robert Kahn, then of BBN, but soon to join the staff at ARPA, organized a demonstration of the ARPANET for conference attendees. Also at this meeting there was the creation of the International Network Working Group (INWG) to provide for a collaborative process for researchers developing packet switching networks around the world. Subsequently, in September 1973, at a meeting at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf presented a draft of their paper proposing the TCP/IP protocol as the basis for a global Internet.(2) Also in September, 1973 the ARPANET was extended to Norway and the UK. Kahn writes: "(I)international interest in packet switching was growing significantly, and possible requirements for interconnection of domestic packet networks in the different countries were identified." (Packet Satellite, p. 45.1.2) In this context, a proposal was made for an experimental program on packet satellite technology with the British Post Office, the Comsat Satellite Corporation (Comsat), the Norwegian Telecommunications Administration (NTA), and the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (NDRE) to work collaboratively with DARPA researchers. Comsat was the US representative to the Intelsat satellites during this period. Kahn, describing this collaboration, writes: "In 1974, the UK Post Office agreed to support the SATNET experiment by contributing the UK half of the satellite link and by providing access to the necessary earth station equipment in England. A programmable satellite processor was installed at the Goonhilly earth station and connected back to a gateway at the ARPANET node on the premises of University College of London (UCL) with a 48Kbp communication line. UCL was prepared to accept the main research responsibility for the UK participation in the SATNET program, and subsequently did so."(Packet Satellite, p. 45.1.2) (3) Kahn describes how it took several weeks to get the approval in late 1974 from Intelsat for a tariff to be established to allow for packet satellite service for a multi-station service using SATNET for the experiment. Kahn writes: "The SATNET program was initiated in September 1975 with one Intelsat Standard A (30 meters) earth station at Etam, West Virginia and a similar one at Goonhilly Downs, England. Within Norway, the interactions with NTA were handled entirely by the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. While Norwegian participation in the SATNET had started with the first meeting of researchers in 1975, their active participation in the channel began in late 1977, using the Nordic earth station at Tannum, Sweden."(Packet Satellite, p. 45.1.2) The SATNET experiment was conducted from September 1975 through September 1978. While the physical architecture used was determined by existing ground stations and satellites, the logical software aspect of the experiment was the subject of research and evolved through the needs of the experiment. Also Kahn describes how coordination and communication among the researchers was a crucial part of the work. He writes: "Coordinating a program involving participants from multiple countries was an important challenge that was met at several different levels. Quarterly review meetings were held (rotated among the different locations) and attended by all the participants. Technical progress was reviewed at these meetings, technical issues were discussed and resolved and plans for each succeeding quarter were refined. Research issues and results were documented and circulated in a series of informal working group notes." (Packet Satellite, p. 45.1.4-5) Kahn notes that: "The ARPANET played a particularly important role in executing the effort as well as in coordinating it. It provided the means by which the satellite processors were down-line loaded and debugged, and the means by which SATNET itself was controlled and monitored as it was being developed. The message passing capability of the hosts on the ARPANET were used to keep all participants informed of technical progress, system status, often by direct reporting from the programmable satellite processors in SATNET, and to resolve questions and coordinate experiments on a day-to-day basis. Without such a capability, it is doubtful that the overall experimental program could have been carried out successfully." (Packet Satellite, p. 45.1.4-5) Kahn reports that by May 1979, ARPANET access from the UK (was) run "almost exclusively via SATNET on a provisional basis as a primary link between ARPA and its research parties in Europe. The ARPANET link to London (via Norway) was planned to be ended during the last quarter of 1979, leaving SATNET as the means of access between Europe and the US." (4) This link was used for both voice and data packets. (Packet Satellite, 45.1.5-6) (5) In his article "The Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols", Dave Clark writes that: "The top level goal for the DARPA Internet Architecture was to develop an effective technique for multiplexed utilization of existing interconnected networks. The components of the Internet were networks, which were to be interconnected to provide some larger service." (Clark, p.106) The particular networks to be connected were the ARPANET with the newly developing packet radio network (PRNET) and the developing satellite network (SATNET).(6) "At that time," Clark writes, "it was assumed that there would be other sorts of networks to interconnect, although the local area network had not yet emerged." (Clark, p.106-7) "An alternative to interconnecting existing networks," he explains, "would have been to design a unified system which incorporated a variety of different transmission media, a multi-media network. While this might have permitted a higher degree of integration, and thus better performance, it was felt that it was necessary to incorporate the then existing architectures if (the-ed) Internet was to be useful in a practical sense. Further, networks represent administrative boundaries of control, and it was an ambition of this project to come to grips with the problem of integrating a number of separately administered entities into a common utility." (Clark, p.107) The problem of being able to integrate these dissimilar administrative entities represented both a technical and a management challenge. Clark points out the need for tools to facilitate the management of networking resources "in the context of multiple administrations." (Clark, p.110) He also proposes the need to understand how it was possible to manage the project in a way that made it possible for researchers from a number of different institutional entities to work together toward a common goal. In this article published in 1988, he writes: "It would be impossible to acknowledge all the contributions to the Internet projects; there have been literally hundreds over the 15 years of development: designers, implementers, writers and critics. Indeed, an important topic, which probably deserves a paper in itself, is the process by which this project was managed. The participants come from universities, research laboratories and corporations, and they united (to some extent) to achieve this common goal." (Clark, p.114) In his article "Globalization of the Internet", Barry Leiner describes a related but similarly necessary requirement for the Internet's early and continued development. Leiner explains how the early days of Internet development were characterized by "international cooperation and motivation". He writes: "Packet radio networking was actively being explored both in the United States and in the UK...." Leiner describes the international cooperation of researchers developing packet-switching technologies and the international participation in working groups with regular meetings in Europe which were held to coordinate this collaboration. Describing the creation in 1981 of the International Cooperation Board (ICB), Leiner explains that the ICB "formed to facilitate cooperation among several NATO countries in the research and development of computer networking and its applications. "SATNET," he writes, "had nodes in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway and the US." (Globalization, p.17) He outlines some of the other networking developments during the 1980s like CSNET, BITNET, NASA's Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN), the High Energy Physics Network (HEPNET) and the UUCP Network including Usenet which provided a collaborative distributed network for Unix users. Also Leiner notes the diverse networking experiments during this period like the UK's JANET (Joint Academic Network). His article not only describes the international development of packet networks, but also the need for appropriate forms of coordination among the researchers developing and those operating these networks. "The Internet," Leiner writes, "began as a multiorganizational activity, and as such has always required a substantial coordinating activity." (Globalization, p.28) Describing such coordinating activities, Leiner writes: "Even in the early days of its development under DARPA leadership, there were a set of working groups beginning with the ARPA Network Working Group (NWG) and continuing to the Internet Research Group (IRG) and its associated committees. With the expansion of the activity beyond DARPA and beyond the research community, the importance of these activities has grown." (Globalization, p.28) Leiner explains that the evolution of the IAB (the Internet Architecture Board) and the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force) are examples of such coordinating bodies. At the time his article was written, the Internet Society was being formed. (7) Another form of international coordination Leiner describes is the information International Academic Networkshop meetings (IANW) originally organized by Peter Kirstein of the UCL and then by Larry Landweber of the University of Wisconsin. Leiner writes: "These meetings, held from 1982 to 1989, were attended at first by network implementers from Europe and the US and later were expanded to include representatives from Latin America and the Pacific Rim. They laid the foundation for much of the early cooperation between academic computer science groups developing networks round the world." (Globalization, p.29) Tracing the coordination activities that developed along with scientific networks like SPAN, HEPNET and BITNET, Leiner notes that they were accompanied by the creation of formal and informal working groups. "Beginning in the mid-1980s," he writes, "we began to see a higher level of coordination as networking became more pervasive." He describes the creation of Reseaux Associes pour la Recherche Europeene (RARE) in 1986 and RIPE(Reseaux IP Europeens) incorporated by RARE to coordinate TCP/IP activities in Europe." (Globalization, p.30) In 1987, while the NSFNET was developing as the backbone in the US for the Internet, Europe was carrying on its program of international networking, Leiner explains, through the auspices of RARE. In November 1987, after an IANW meeting was held at Princeton, key networking people from the US and Europe met in Washington, D.C. to discuss coordinating the growing international networking activities. Leiner writes(Globalization, p.31): "A vision was articulated at that meeting of the global research networks serving as an infrastructure for the global research community. An informal coordinating body was formed, originally called NACC (the Necessary Ad Hoc Coordinating Committee)." Leiner describes the surprising development that shortly after this meeting to establish an international coordination body in 1987, the FRIIC (Federal Research Internet Coordinating Committee) was formed to coordinate the research being done by the US government in networking. The surprise here is that the national committee was formed only after there was the need demonstrated by the creation of an international coordinating body. Shortly after it was formed, writes Leiner, the NACC changed its name to the Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Networks (CCIRN). In 1990 the CCIRN began the Intercontinental Engineering Planning Group (IEPG) to provide the engineering planning and coordination for the Internet's operation. Other coordinating groups were formed like (NA-CCIRN), the North American Coordinating Committee for International Research Networks , (Euro-CCIRN ) European Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Networks and (AP-CCIRN) Asian Pacific Coordinating Committee for International Research Networks. (Globalization, p.33) Outlining how the IAB and IETF have taken an international focus and how from their earliest days they included researchers from around the world, particularly Europe, Leiner writes: "In particular, the IAB and the IETF have always functioned through close interaction between participants (individual researchers and engineers). This has meant a relatively high degree of communications, including face-to-face meetings. The logical difficulties of maintaining this high level of interaction in an international environment, " he suggests, " are an obstacle to the continued unified approach taken in the Internet community, and must be overcome." (Globalization, p.35) The internationalization of the Internet thus means that "it must be designed to be more flexible and accommodating to different levels of technology [than -ed] is typical in a single region." This helps to clarify that the significant characteristic of the Internet is that it is an international computer communications system. This requires that the protocols be able to accommodate the broad ranging set of technology that will be operating around the globe. It also means that the support for close communication and coordination among those developing and operating the networks in different regions and different countries is a requirement as important as support for the technical development of the protocols. The mechanism for providing this coordination must become more sophisticated as the Internet scales. Contrary to popular mythology the Internet developed as a global computer communications system as a result of careful attention to developing the communication and coordination processes needed by a global Internet. To continue to scale the Internet, there is a need to understand the requirements for continuing coordination and support their development. In an article that Leiner wrote in 1997 titled "A Brief History of the Internet", he describes how this problem continues to be unsolved, and is an outstanding challenge to be met if Internet development will continue. Leiner writes: "The most pressing question for the future of the Internet is not how the technology will change, but how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed....We now see, in the debates over the control of the domain name space and the form of the next generation IP addresses, a struggle to find the next social structure that will guide the Internet in the future. The form of that structure will harder to find, given the large number of concerned stake-holders...If the Internet stumbles, it will not be because we lack for technology, vision, or motivation. It will be because we cannot set a direction and march collectively into the future." Footnotes (1) Ronda Hauben, "Developing the New Field of Computer Communications", http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/computer-communciations.txt (2) V. Cerf, and R. Kahn, "Towards protocols for Internetwork Communication," IFIP/TC6.1/39.NIC 18764(Sept. 73) 33p. The paper was officially published as "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" in the IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol com-22, No. 5, May 1974 (3) See also Peter T. Kirstein, "Early Experiences with the ARPANET and INTERNET in the UK," History of the UK ARPANET/Internet links, Annals of the History of Computing, July 28, 1998. (4) SATNET was decommissioned in 1989. (5) Kahn writes that after the ARPANET link via Norway was taken down, the plan was that "NDRE will utilize SATNET for research purposes; the only planned use of the remaining point-to-point ARPANET link from the U.S. to Norway will be for retrieval of seismic data, which was the original function of that line prior to its incorporation in the ARPANET in 1973." (Packet Satellite, p. 45.1.5-6) (6) The development of PRNET is described in Robert E. Kahn, "The Organization of Computer Resources into a Packet Radio Network", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol Com-25, No. 1, January 1977. Clark writes that the original purpose of the original connection of PRNET and the ARPANET was to give users on the packet radio network access to the larger service machinery on the ARPANET. (7) The events surrounding the development of ICANN connected with Internet Society meetings require further discussion that is not within the scope of this paper. Bibliography David Clark, "The Philosophy of DARPA Internet Protocols," Communications of the ACM, 1988 Robert E. Kahn, "The Introduction of Packet Satellite Communication". Barry Leiner, "Globalization of the Internet", in Internet System Handbook, ed, Dan Lynch and Marshall Rose, Reading, MA : Addison Wesley, 1993.