Net Nard

About Net Nard

The internet is not a thing that somebody built and now operates. It is an arrangement between many independent networks that each chose to connect, and it holds together for reasons that are worth understanding properly.

Ask who runs the internet and the honest answer is that nobody does, not in the way anybody runs a railway or an airline or a water utility. There is no head office, no chief executive of the network, no single organisation that can switch it off or decide what it carries. What exists instead is a very large number of separate networks, each owned and operated by somebody different, each making its own decisions about equipment and staffing and customers, and each choosing to exchange traffic with some of the others. The internet is the name we give to the result of all those choices. It is a pattern rather than a possession, and once that is understood, a great many otherwise puzzling things about it become clear.

This surprises people because almost every other system of comparable scale has an owner. Electricity grids have operators. Postal systems have national administrators. Aviation has authorities that license aircraft and control airspace. The instinct to look for the equivalent body here is entirely reasonable, and the fact that the search comes up empty is not an oversight or a gap waiting to be filled. It is the arrangement working as intended. The networks that make up the internet remain independent precisely because no central authority was ever placed above them, and they cooperate because cooperating serves each of them, not because anybody instructed them to.

What people call the internet is better understood as a set of arrangements between separate operators than as a single constructed object.

The requirement that a name means the same thing everywhere is what forces a genuinely central function into an otherwise decentralised system.

The technical conventions everyone follows are written in forums that anybody with the interest and effort can join.

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