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#Totally reliable delivery service glitches software

If your computer spoke “web” by running a browser, then it could speak with servers that also spoke web, naturally enough known as websites. Tim Berners-Lee took up the invite and invented the protocols for the World Wide Web, an application to run on the internet.

So the internet was a recipe for mortar, with an invitation for anyone, and everyone, to bring their own bricks.

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There are only engineers who meet every so often to refine its suggested communications protocols that hardware and software makers, and network builders, are then free to take up as they please. Indeed, the internet had and has no main menu, no CEO, no public stock offering, no formal organization at all. Unlike the briefly ascendant proprietary networks such as CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy, content and network would be separated. And because the network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to frequent. Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party.

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Instead, they settled on the equivalent of rules for how to bolt existing networks together. The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network the way that, for example, FedEx metabolized a capital outlay of tens of millions of dollars to deploy liveried planes, trucks, people, and drop-off boxes, creating a single point-to-point delivery system. The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise massive amounts of capital to build the network and second, they didn’t want or expect to make money from their invention. They are artifacts of a very particular circumstance, and it’s unlikely that in an alternate timeline they would have been designed the same way. Underpinning our vast and simple-seeming digital networks are technologies that, if they hadn’t already been invented, probably wouldn’t unfold the same way again.

And every bit as much aligned with the vicissitudes of magic, when the internet doesn’t work, the reasons are typically so arcane that explanations for it are about as useful as trying to pick apart a failed spell. In Steve Jobs’s words, “ it just works,” as readily as clicking, tapping, or speaking. The internet-how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human civilization-fits Clarke’s observation well. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.