From Internet to WWW: a fundamental step

Internet and WWW

Two terms that are often combined. Actually, they represent two different things.

In the November post (article at the link here), we talked about how the infrastructure that allows us to build our research bricks and how these bricks then become a house, i.e., how our information is inserted on the web and the same web returns us the information we ask for.

The WWW or W3 stands for World Wide Web, the network on which the major services rely. Services are communication exchanges, which become useful information, between us and the rest of the world. Such communication occurs through the hypertext transfer protocol, the so-called http that became https, where “s” stands for, in very simple terms, “secure” (in English http).

This protocol was designed by the Cern scientist from Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee on March 12, 1989. Through a scientific paper [Information management: a proposal], he made the physical connection an interconnected connection: if until that moment, the document exchange was delegated to a single channel and centralized with Berners-Lee, and then a series of scientists around the world, such exchange occurs in an interconnected way, through a series of links that make the network interchangeable and permissive, allowing you to move from one link to another.

These links have an application as a vehicle, called a browser, which allowed communication to be reached from any computer and not just from specific computers.

So, what changes from the Internet to the WWW? The Internet is a local network that was able to connect all identified computers with each other.

These computers are localized, even if geographically distant, as nodes, i.e., direct routing centers. With the WWW, the network becomes global, and the connections are accessible to everyone, not just specific or military nodes of what will become the global network.

Network and WWW: Etymology

The term “Rete” (Italian for network) refers to its own etymology. This comes from the Latin “RÈTE,” which Curtius believes comes from “SRÊT-E,” formed by metathesis on the same base as “SÈRT-US,” past participle of “SÈRERE” (to weave, compare to series, serto), just as “serp-ere” is compared to “rép-ere” (to crawl, see Erpete and Serpe).

Similarly, in German, “netz” means “net,” which is related to sewing, spinning, and weaving. Others connect the term “Rete” to “RETINÈRE” (to retain). It refers to a tool made of string or rope knitted together to catch birds, fish, and wild animals. Figuratively, it can also refer to traps and deceptions. Like other similar tools used for containment and protection, the term “Rete” comes from “Retàre,” “Retàta,” “Reticèlla,” “Retícola,” “Retína,” “Rézza,” and “Rézzola” (definition of “Rete” from Treccani).

Thus, the network serves as the backdrop for the relationships and world in which we live. In this interwoven web, as mentioned above, we are interconnected to our fundamental needs, such as food, transportation, healthcare, telecommunications, banking, financial services, political institutions, and public safety. Any interruption or loss of one of these services can create a domino effect and cause real disasters for others.

“Rete” also refers to fishing nets, strings of rope tied with knots, flowing water, fish collected in a boat, a mythical figure in the Gospels in the arena of Roman gladiators, the Swarm guerrilla tactics (attacking the enemy from all directions without giving away the orientation of the front), and the connections of television and the web [G. Caldarelli, M. Catanzaro, Scienza delle reti, Egea, Milano, 2016].

WWW and Social Networks

This scenario creates social networks (connections between people) and artificial networks (connections between people through social media and devices) that involve more complex situations (hubs), individuals (nodes), and connections (links) [Chains of information distribution and dissemination in which the same information triggers problems and the keys to defuse them are prevention and management].

Understanding and weaving these dependencies means understanding society itself, the reciprocal dependence between people and things.

In this sense, information systems are the structures that intersect different elements, but that are part of society, taking into account the importance that weak or strong ties begin to play in the social structure and their upcoming “dependence”.

A good example in this sense “comes from the study of an ecological problem that had great economic implications.

In the 1980s, there was a collapse in the number of cod in the Northwest Atlantic. This shortage was the cause of a serious economic crisis that affected the Canadian fishing industry. The companies affected by the problem requested an increase in the hunt for seals, arguing that controlling these predators of cod would help stop the collapse.

Many seals were killed during the 1990s, but the cod population did not recover. In the meantime, ecologists studied the different food chains that link cod to seals.

At the end of the decade, they obtained a complete map of the multiple chains that connect the two species. From this particularly intricate network, it is deduced that killing cod predators is not necessarily a good thing for this species.

Seals, in fact, are predators of about 150 species, and many of these are predators of cod: reducing the seal population only increases the pressure of other predators on the species we would like to protect” [G. Caldarelli, M. Catanzaro, Scienza delle reti, p.16, ivi].

The World Wide Web and Communication Languages

Within a year, Berners-Lee documented the three technologies that are the foundations of the web:

HTML (the language for formatting and pagination of hypertext documents), URL (the unique address that identifies each resource on the network) The HTTP protocol that allows you to retrieve all linked resources.

This is the birth of the World Wide Web.

On August 6, 1991, the first website in history appeared, designed by Berners-Lee himself, which, on an extremely simple graphical interface, disclosed some technical information and the first details about the functioning of the web.

At that time, of course, the only people who had the tools to navigate the emerging network were Berners-Lee and his colleagues at Cern. It was only in 1993, when the Mosaic browser software was released (created by a team led by Marc Andreessen), that this new technology began to spread outside the world of research.

Mosaic is also the first browser that allows you to view images and includes everything that is now an integral part of every online navigation software: the address bar, forward, backward, and refresh page buttons, and more.

A year later, in 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) within MIT, a company whose goal is to create standards that ensure that all sites on the emerging web work according to the same principles of compatibility.

In short, the web opens up to the world. And its inventor realizes that the true potential of the network would be exploited only if this technology were free and accessible to everyone: “If the technology had been proprietary and under my total control, it probably would not have taken off. The decision to make the web an open system was necessary to make it universal. You can’t propose something as a universal space and at the same time maintain control over it.”

The choice gives rise to an open web, free from commercial logic, forever changing its history, transforming it into a tool accessible to all and allowing that wave of innovation that has made the network a universal and decentralized tool, in which anyone can take part.

The Challenges for the Future

This results in a universe of information that is free, open to all, and confusing, in which the first search engines intervene to bring order.

In 1994, Yahoo was born thanks to two students, David Filo and Jerry Yang, as a tool for indexing web pages. However, in its original version, it was difficult to update and control due to the daily increase of online sites.

Three years later, on September 15th, 1997, a new search engine appeared that uses keywords and the hierarchy of content, referring to links related to them, just as it is done in academia with papers, for information retrieval on the web platform. This was Google.

Thanks to Yahoo and Google, there was a real economic boom of the internet. However, soon after, with the arrival of the first digital giants and subsequently social networks, the decentralized internet of Berners-Lee gave way to one composed increasingly of large commercial platforms, which, after incorporating information into so-called walled gardens, make it available only for commercial purposes.

From here, the next step of the internet invading all aspects of our lives was a short one.

Meanwhile, before the WWW, cybernetics was born, which with the concept of Critical Infrastructure and Digital Transformation, in turn, becomes the must of our days.

But that is the next story…