In effect, the Internet is a global connection of interconnected computers. It has been described as truly a peer-to-peer system with many distributed nodes and no central point of control architecture.
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 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.
The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services.
The Internet is a computing platform built on top of core technology. Applied technology is what gets built on top of that: It's Web services.
But it is as silly to think about peer-to-peer as applying just to music as it would have been to think about the Internet as applying just to pornography. Whatever the initial use of the technology, it has nothing to do with the potential of the architecture to serve many other extremely important functions.
By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.
Blockchain technology isn't just a more efficient way to settle securities. It will fundamentally change market structures, and maybe even the architecture of the Internet itself.
Unlike the phone system, which is engineered around an application, the Internet layered model allows you to, in essence, separate applications from infrastructure.
Both Republicans and Democrats championed a structure that allowed the 'application layer' of Internet architecture to be free from government intervention, apart from occasional Federal Trade Commission activity.
