Networks and the internet

Wired, wireless and cloud — three layers of one connection rather than three choices.

Around 99% of international traffic runs through undersea cables. Only the last hop is usually wireless.

Computing rented from a provider's data centre rather than owned.

Where the data physically sits, which country's law applies, and whether the service exists tomorrow.

Client, server, modem, router, switch, hub.

A switch connects devices within one network. A router passes traffic between networks and chooses the path.

A switch sends each message only to its destination. A hub sends everything to everyone — slower and less private.

Roles, not machine types. Whatever asks is a client; whatever answers is a server.

Bandwidth is how much data passes per second. Latency is the delay before the first data arrives.

An agreed set of rules for how machines communicate — how to start, how to send, how to report an error.

The rules are public, so anyone can build equipment that joins the network — which is why no company owns the internet.

Routing around damage makes a network hard to break by accident and hard to censor on purpose. The same property.

Email, hosting, cloud storage and backup, phone service, domain names, filtering.

Which sites you reach and when — the pattern — even where the contents are encrypted.

Everything passes through them, so courts, governments and rights-holders all enforce through them.

The power is unavoidable — someone runs the wires — so the question is whether its use is visible and appealable.

The internet is the global network of networks. The web is ONE service on it — linked pages fetched by a browser using HTTP.

Internet: ARPANET 1969, TCP/IP 1983. Web: proposed 1989, public 1991.

If a browser and a page are not involved, it is not the web.

Blocking a website touches one service. Shutting off the internet touches everything. They are different measures.

1.0: a few publish, everyone reads. 2.0: users make the content, platforms own the place. 3.0: contested — semantic, or decentralised.

ARPANET 1969, TCP/IP standardised 1983, the web proposed 1989 and public 1991.

Moderation. What may be said became a company policy rather than a law.

Power to speak widened enormously; power to decide what is heard narrowed to a few companies.

Privacy, anonymity and surveillance; the right to be forgotten; the digital divide; freedom of expression and censorship.

The harm and the benefit come from the same property, so removing one removes the other.

Google Spain v AEPD, CJEU 2014 — search results may be de-listed where inadequate, irrelevant or excessive. The page itself stays.

A network built to route around damage treats blocking as damage, so material reappears by another path.