Distributed to Centralized

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Although ARPANET, which was a purely research-oriented network, fostered a more distributed culture, encouraging informal, bottom-up management and interventions into the net, the model of distributed communications could not be fully implemented. Although ARPANET itself was distributed, it was designed as an abstract layer, not as an expensive, separate physical network, ARPANET used existing telephone lines leased from AT&T (the American Telephone and Telegraph Company), lines inevitably based on a centralized model created long ago. In the traditional centralized system used by American telephone companies, long distance lines terminate at a switching station in the oldest and most developed part of a city’s local network, almost always located in downtown. Had a nuclear war taken place, ARPANET would have been completely vulnerable.

Moreover, ARPANET emphasized the use of Interface Message Processors [IMPs], mini-computer interfaces that allowed locally-based hosts to interact with ARPANET. As there was generally only one IMP per site, the result was that if ARPANET as a whole was distributed, at the local level it was highly centralized. Failure of an IMP not only meant that local hosts would fail to reach remote machines, it meant they could not communicate with each other.

By the mid-1970s, peer-to-peer networks such as ARPANET and the National Science Foundation’s NSFNet proliferated. Eventually these would be linked by a single system called the Internet. NSFNet’s rapid growth during the 1970s made it the dominant entity in the early Internet. The NSF implemented communications between regional networks through a “backbone” leased on lines from AT&T and offered central hubs in each city to which local users would connect. The result was the end of the distributed model.

With the exponential growth and privatization of the Internet and the increasing lack of distinction between data networks and telecom systems, this topology was further centralized. Driven by profit, Internet corporations follow existing systems of networking established by telephony. Interconnections are between major nodes located in city cores. Within cities, fiber optics can be laid down more inexpensively and higher capacity, short-distance networks can be built relatively easily. If, following AT&T’s breakup, there has been a proliferation of long-distance carriers, these have to access the local central office for distribution. Naturally, this centralizes the network, privileges the bigger players, and increases the divide between a digital hub in the city core and the digital desert beyond.

next: Los Angeles and the Theology of Ether