Age of the splinternet

摘要

How quickly the world changes. In August 1991 Tim Bemers-Lee, aresearcher at CERN near Geneva, Swi zerland, posted a message to a discussion fon m detailing a new method for sharing information between networked computers. To ma ce his idea a reality, he also set up a server unning on one of CERN's computers. A mere two decades later, some 2 billion of us are hooked up to Berners-Lee's invention, and the UN General Assembly last month declared access to it a fundamental human righ . It is, of course, the World Wide Web. Today, most of us in the de developed world and elsewhere take the internet for granted. But should we? The way it works and the way we engage with it are still defined by characteristics it has inharited from its easy-going early days, and this has left it under threat - from criminals, controlling authorities and commercial interests. "The days of the internet as we used to think of it are ending," says Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks, a security software company in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Could we now be living in the golden age of the internet?