Rebecca MacKinnon Quotes

The next Internet could be in the making somewhere in someone's lab.

When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash.

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology.

Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web as a set of protocols for transferring, linking and addressing documents to send over the Net. Without the global reach and open technical standards of the Internet, the Web could never have proliferated as it did.

Choosing a single most important development is incredibly hard to do because a lot of different things had to happen before the Internet could be deployed in the fashion it is today.

The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense, the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet.

So as I look at transitioning to the communication platforms of the future, I see that the beauty of Internet protocols is you get the separation of the layers between service and technology.

The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.

The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.

The Internet was developed in large part by U.S. government research funding to develop new communications networks, starting with a network created by the Department of Defense.

Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.

The Internet works thanks to loose but trusted connections among its many constituent parts, with easy entry and exit for new Internet service providers or new forms of expanding access.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

I am instinctively a network infrastructure plumber.

One of my bosses happened to be one of the early architects of some of the ways Internet providers work. He taught me how the cables connect, how the telecom providers work... I learned how to make my own Ethernet cables, all the way up to running a small business.

Unlike the phone system, which is engineered around an application, the Internet layered model allows you to, in essence, separate applications from infrastructure.

The Internet wasn't useful until some basic infrastructure was built.

What is responsible for the phenomenal development of the Internet? Well, it certainly wasn't heavy-handed government regulation.

The internet exchange is sort of the core points where all of the international cables come together, where all of the internet service providers come together, and they trade lines with each other. These are priority one targets for any sort of espionage agency, because they provide access to so many people's communications.

We covered every major segment of this broadband communications world.

It is very difficult for me to speculate as to how long it will take for the LTE-TDD ecosystem to mature. Of course, the whole industry is speaking of scale and a combination of scale in order to get more efficiency in the ecosystem.

Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that's what's happening now.

The Internet is literally a network of networks.

As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.

We mustn't forget we chose the name 'WWW' before there was even one line of code written. We could do that because the Internet as an infrastructure was already there.