Was the Internet’s Birthday Really Last Week?

Last week, I published a short article that used the birthday of the Internet as a hook for saying that 35 years may seem old, but the Internet is still young. Regulators need to remember that internet applications are still developing, and shouldn’t be treated as “mature” akin to a public utility (see VoIP, censorship, etc.). I received some feedback saying that September 2 was really the birthday for ARPANET, created by the United States Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) that in 1969 linked universities and research centers. So was I wrong about the birthday?

Technically, yes, but maybe not totally wrong. There are a number of key milestone dates stemming from early thought papers to actual implementations, tests and deployments. Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn first presented their well known paper that introduced what is now known as TCP/IP in 1973 and it was published in ’74. In fact, one of the ‘net’s early founders wrote me to say that the Internet “was born in 1973, if writing down the conceptual idea is the defining moment. There followed about a decade of detailed design, implementation and testing as an overlay on the ARPANET. If the defining moment is when the Internet became operational, it would have been during the first few months of 1983. January 1, 1983 was the target cutover date but it took a while longer in practice.”

But I struggle with defining the birth of the Internet (and maybe this is not really a worthwhile effort anyway). Is it merely TCP/IP? Some of the applications used on the ARPANET were email, remote terminal access and file transfers, and these continue to be used today. I think that most non-techies (which includes many tech policy folks, somewhat unfortunately) look at applications and overall similarities. I played my article to this crowd, at the risk of sounding uninformed to those knowledgeable about the Internet and its beginnings.

But who doesn’t like a party? Maybe we’ll just have to throw multiple celebrations for the Internet (and please excuse my cutesy anthropomorphic reference to the Internet – a network of networks – as a person).

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