Few paid attention, on September 2, 1969, when about 20 people met at the laboratory of Kleinrock, in the University of California (USA), to attend two computers passing test data through a gray cable, whose length was of more or less 15 meters.

Entertaining videos were not in Len Kleinrock‘s mind and his team from the University of California, when they began the tests of what, in four decades, it would become the internet. Either the social networks were thought, or most of other applications whose easy use attracts more than one billion people on-line.

The researchers tried to create an open net for the change of free information – an opening that, ultimately, it stimulated the innovation that later would create sites like YouTube and Facebook.

But it was during the seventies that the exchange of information for email and through the creation of TCP/IP protocols that allowed the connection of several nets that later formed the internet. Later in the eighties the address system with suffixes as “.com” and “.org” appeared and they were spread thoroughly.

However, only after Tim Berners-Lee invented World Wide Web (subset of the internet that facilitates the connection of resources through different positions) and with the providers’ appearance like America Online is that the internet began to do part of the day by day of the people.

And it is exactly for this that the internet could develop: during almost 30 years it was ignored and, therefore, it was free from regulate and commercial restrictions, making possible experimentations, as the development and the evolution of language codes as HTML, Flash, Java, PHP, among many others.

Even the pornography contributed to the evolution of the internet, because it diffused the on-line distribution of videos, as well as it helped to develop systems of electronic payments.

The appearance of sites as YouTube, of social networks like Orkut, MySpace, Windows Live, Twitter and Facebook allowed billions of people to begin to interact with each other.

However, there is still a lot of space for innovation, in spite of the crescents problems. Although the internet is available in a wider and fast way, the artificial barriers threaten the continuity of its growth. In other words, a middle age crisis.

Many factors are guilty. Spam and virtual pirates’ attacks force the net operators to raise barriers of safety. Authoritarian regimes block the access to many sites and services inside their borders.

Besides, even in democratic countries like England and United States are being created new barriers to discourage the consumers’ unrestricted use, trying to impede that certain contents cannot be changed freely. That means the end of the neutrality of the internet.

And that represents a huge danger for the internet, as for the individuals: the internet was developed for the change of information and not to enrich corporations that just want to increase their profits.

Via: National Geographic.