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RFC1935 - What is the Internet, Anyway?

王朝other·作者佚名  2008-05-31
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Network Working Group J. Quarterman

Request For Comments: 1935 S. Carl-Mitchell

Category: Informational TIC

April 1996

What is the Internet, Anyway?

Status of This Memo

This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo

does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of

this memo is unlimited.

Copyright (c) 1994 TIC

From Matrix News, 4(8), August 1994

Permission is hereby granted for redistribution of this article

provided that it is redistributed in its entirety, including

the copyright notice and this notice.

Contact: mids@tic.com, +1-512-451-7602, fax: +1-512-452-0127.

http://www.tic.com/mids, gopher://gopher.tic.com/11/matrix/news

A shorter version of this article appeared in MicroTimes.

IntrodUCtion

We often mention the Internet, and in the press you read about the

Internet as the prototype of the Information Highway; as a research

tool; as open for business; as not ready for prime time; as a place

your children might communicate with (pick one) a. strangers, b.

teachers, c. pornographers, d. other children, e. their parents; as

bigger than Poland; as smaller than Chicago; as a place to surf; as

the biggest hype since Woodstock; as a competitive business tool; as

the newest thing since sliced bread.

A recent New York Times article quoting one of us as to the current

size of the Internet has particularly stirred up quite a ruckus. The

exact figures attributed to John in the article are not the ones we

recommended for such use, but the main point of contention is whether

the Internet is, as the gist of the article said, smaller than many

other estimates have said. Clearly lots of people really want to

believe that the Internet is very large. Succeeding discussion has

shown that some want to believe that so much that they want to count

computers and people that are probably *going to be* connected some

time in the future, even if they are not actually connected now. We

prefer to talk about who is actually on the Internet and on other

networks now. We'll get back to the sizes of the various networks

later, but for now let's discuss a more basic issue that is at the

heart of much confusion and contention about sizes: what is the

Internet, anyway?

Starting at the Center

For real confusion, start trying to get agreement on what is part of

the Internet: NSFNET? CIX? Your company's internal network?

Prodigy? FidoNet? The mainframe in accounting? Some people would

include all of the above, and perhaps even consider excluding

anything politically incorrect. Others have cast douBTs on each of

the above.

Let's start some place almost everyone would agree is on the

Internet. Take RIPE, for example. The acronym stands for European

IP Networks. RIPE is a coordinating group for IP networking in

Europe. (IP is the Internet protocol, which is the basis of the

Internet. IP has a suite of associated protocols, including the

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, and the name IP, or sometimes

TCP/IP, is often used to refer to the whole protocol suite.) RIPE's

computers are physically located in Amsterdam. The important feature

of RIPE for our purposes is that you can reach RIPE (usually by using

its domain, ripe.net) from just about anywhere anyone would agree is

on the Internet.

Reach it with what? Well, just about any service anyone would agree

is related to the Internet. RIPE has a WWW (World Wide Web) server,

a Gopher server, and an anonymous FTP server. So they provide

documents and other resources by hypertext, menu browsing, and file

retrieval. Their personnel use client programs such as Mosaic and

Lynx to Access other people's servers, too, so RIPE is a both

distributor and a consumer of resources via WWW, Gopher, and FTP.

They support TELNET interfaces to some of their services, and of

course they can TELNET out and log in remotely anywhere they have

personal login accounts or someone else has an anonymous TELNET

service such a library catalog available. They also have electronic

mail, they run some mailing lists, and some of their people read and

post news articles to USENET newsgroups.

WWW, Gopher, FTP, TELNET, mail, lists, and news: that's a pretty

characteristic set of major Internet services. There are many more

obscure Internet services, but it's pretty safe to say that an

organization like RIPE that is reachable with all these services is

on the Internet.

Reachable from where? Russia first connected to the Internet in

1992. For a while it was reachable from networks in the Commercial

Internet Exchange (CIX) and from various other networks, but not from

NSFNET, the U.S. National Science Foundation network. At the time,

some people considered NSFNET so important that they didn't count

Russia as reachable because it wasn't accessible through NSFNET.

Since there are now several other backbone networks in the U.S. as

fast (T3 or 45Mbps) as NSFNET, and routing through NSFNET isn't very

restricted anymore, few people would make that distinction anymore.

So for the moment let's just say reachable through NSFNET or CIX

networks, and get back to services.

Looking at Firewalls

Many companies and other organizations run networks that are

deliberately firewalled so that their users can get to servers like

those at ripe.net, but nobody outside the company network can get to

company hosts. A user of such a network can thus use WWW, Gopher,

FTP, and TELNET, but cannot supply resources through these protocols

to people outside the company. Since a network that is owned and

operated by a company in support of its own operations is called an

enterprise network, let's call these networks enterprise IP networks,

since they typically use the Internet Protocol (IP) to support these

services. Some companies integrate their enterprise IP networks into

the Internet without firewalls, but most do use firewalls, and those

are the ones that are of interest here, since they're the ones with

one-way access to these Internet services. Another name for an

enterprise IP network, with or without firewall, is an enterprise

Internet.

For purposes of this distinction between suppliers and consumers, it

doesn't matter whether the hosts behind the firewall access servers

beyond the firewall by direct IP and TCP connections from their own

IP addresses, or whether they use proxy application gateways (such as

SOCKS) at the firewall. In either case, they can use outside

services, but cannot supply them.

So for services such as WWW, Gopher, FTP, and TELNET, we can draw a

useful distinction between supplier or distributor computers such as

those at ripe.net and consumer computers such as those inside

firewalled enterprise IP networks. It might seem more obvious to say

producer computers and consumer computers, since those would be more

clearly paired terms. However, the information distributed by a

supplier computer isn't necessarily produced on that computer or

within its parent organization. In fact, most of the information on

the bigger FTP archive servers is produced elsewhere. So we choose

to say distributors and consumers. Stores and shoppers would work

about as well, if you prefer.

Even more useful than discussing computers that actually are

suppliers or consumers right now may be a distinction between

supplier-capable computers (not firewalled) and consumer-capable

computers (firewalled). This is because a computer that is not

supplying information right now may be capable of doing so as soon as

someone puts information on it and tells it to supply it. That is,

setting up a WWW, Gopher, or FTP server isn't very difficult; much

less difficult than getting corporate permission to breach a

firewall. Similarly, a computer may not be able to retrieve

resources by WWW, Gopher, at the moment, since client programs for

those services usually don't come with the computer or its basic

software, but almost any computer can be made capable of doing so by

adding some software. In both cases, once you've got the basic IP

network connection, adding capabilities for specific services is

relatively easy.

Let's call the non-firewalled computers the core Internet, and the

core plus the consumer-capable computers the consumer Internet. Some

people have referred to these two categories as the Backbone Internet

and the Internet Web. We find the already existing connotations of

"Backbone" and "Web" confusing, so we prefer core Internet and

consumer Internet.

It's true that many companies with firewalls have one or two

computers carefully placed at the firewall so that they can serve

resources. Company employees may be able to place resources on these

servers, but they can't serve resources directly from their own

computers. It's rather like having to reserve space on a single

company delivery truck, instead of owning one yourself. If you're

talking about companies, yes, the company is thus fully on the core

Internet, yet its users aren't as fully on the Internet as users not

behind a firewall.

If you're just interested in computers that can distribute

information (maybe you're selling server software), that's a much

smaller Internet than if you're interested in all the computers that

can retrieve such information for their users (maybe you have

information you want to distribute). A few years ago it probably

wouldn't have been hard to get agreement that firewalled company

networks were a different kind of thing than the Internet itself.

Nowadays, firewalls have become so popular that it's hard to find an

enterprise IP network that is not firewalled, and the total number of

hosts on such consumer-capable networks is probably almost as large

as the number on the supplier-capable core of the Internet. So many

people now like to include these consumer-capable networks along with

the supplier-capable core when discussing the Internet.

Some people claim that you can't measure the number of consumer-

capable computers or users through measurements taken on the Internet

itself. Perhaps not, but you can get an idea of how many actual

consumers there are by simply counting accesses to selected servers

and comparing the results to other known facts about the accessing

organizations. And there are other ways to get useful information

about consumers on the Internet, including aSKINg them.

Mail, Lists, and News

But what about mail, lists, and news? We carefully left those out of

the discussion of firewalls, because almost all the firewalled

networks do let these communications services in and out, so there's

little useful distinction between firewalled and non-firewalled

networks on the basis of these services. That's because there's a

big difference between these communications services and the resource

sharing (TELNET, FTP) and resource discovery (Gopher, WWW) services

that firewalls usually filter. The communications services are

normally batch, asynchronous, or store-and-forward. These

characterizations mean more or less the same thing, so pick the one

you like best. The point is that when you send mail, you compose a

message and queue it for delivery. The actual delivery is a separate

process; it may take seconds or hours, but it is done after you

finish composing the message, and you normally do not have to wait

for the message to be delivered before doing something else. It is

not uncommon for a mail system to batch up several messages to go

through a single network link or to the same destination and then

deliver them all at once. And mail doesn't even necessarily go to

its final destination in one hop; repeated storing at an intermediate

destination followed by forwarding to another computer is common;

thus the term store-and-forward. Mailing lists are built on top of

the same delivery mechanisms as regular electronic mail. USENET news

uses somewhat different delivery mechanisms, but ones that are also

typically batch, asynchronous, and store-and-forward. Because it is

delivered in this manner, a mail message or a news article is much

less likely to be a security problem than a TELNET, FTP, Gopher, or

WWW connection. This is why firewalls usually pass mail, lists, and

news in both directions, but usually stop incoming connections of

those interactive protocols.

Because WWW, Gopher, TELNET, and FTP are basically interactive, you

need IP or something like it to support them. Because mail, lists,

and news are asynchronous, you can support them with protocols that

are not interactive, such as UUCP and FidoNet. In fact, there are

whole networks that do just that, called UUCP and FidoNet, among

others. These networks carry mail and news, but are not capable of

supporting TELNET, FTP, Gopher, or WWW. We don't consider them part

of the Internet, since they lack the most distinctive and

characteristic services of the Internet.

Some people argue that networks such as FidoNet and UUCP should also

be counted as being part of the Internet, since electronic mail is

the most-used service even on the core, supplier-capable Internet.

They further argue that the biggest benefit of the Internet is the

community of discussion it supports, and mail is enough to join that.

Well, if mail is enough to be on the Internet, why is the Internet

drawing such attention from press and new users alike? Mail has been

around for quite a while (1972 or 1973), but that's not what has made

such an impression on the public. What has is the interactive

services, and interfaces to them such as Mosaic. Asynchronous

networks such as FidoNet and UUCP don't support those interactive

services, and are thus not part of the Internet. Besides, if being

part of a community of discussion was enough, we would have to also

include anyone with a fax machine or a telephone. Recent events have

demonstrated that all readers of the New York Times would also have

to be included. With edges so vague, what would be the point in

calling anything the Internet? We choose to stick with a definition

of the Internet as requiring the interactive services.

Some people argue that anything that uses RFC-822 mail is therefore

using Internet mail and must be part of the Internet. We find this

about as plausible as arguing that anybody who flies in a Boeing 737

is using American equipment and is thus within the United States.

Besides, there are plenty of systems out there that use mail but not

RFC-822.

So what to call systems that can exchange mail, but aren't on the

Internet? We say they are part of the Matrix, which is all computer

systems worldwide that can exchange electronic mail. This term is

borrowed (with permission) from Bill Gibson, the science fiction

writer.

Other people refer to the Matrix as global E-mail. That's accurate,

but is a description, rather than a name. Some even call it the e-

mail Internet. We find that term misleading, since if a system can

only exchange mail, we don't consider it part of the Internet. Not

to mention not everything in the world defines itself in terms of the

Internet, or communicates through the Internet. FidoNet and WWIVnet,

for example, have gateways between themselves that have nothing to do

with the Internet. Referring to the Matrix as the Internet is rather

like referring to the United Kingdom as England. You may call it

convenient shorthand; the Scots may disagree.

What about news? Well, the set of all systems that exchange news

already has a name: USENET. USENET is presumably a subset of the

Matrix, since it's hard to imagine a USENET node without mail, even

though USENET itself is news, not mail. USENET is clearly not the

same thing as the Internet, since many (almost certainly most)

Internet nodes do not carry USENET news, and many USENET nodes are on

other networks, especially UUCP, FidoNet, and BITNET.

A few years ago it was popular in some corners of the press to

attempt to equate USENET and the Internet. They're clearly not the

same. News, like mail, is an asynchronous, batch, store-and-forward

service. The distinguishing services of the Internet are

interactive, not news.

Asynchronous Compared to Dialup

Please note that interactive vs. asynchronous isn't the same thing as

direct vs. dialup connections. Dialup IP is still IP and can support

all the usual IP services. It's true that for the more bandwidth-

intensive services such as WWW, you'll be a lot happier with a *fast*

dialup IP connection, but any dialup IP connection can support WWW.

Some people call these on-demand IP connections, or part-time IP

access. They're typically supported over SLIP, PPP, ISDN, or perhaps

even X.25.

It's also true that it's a lot easier to run a useful interactive

Internet supplier node if you're at least dialed up most of the time

so that consumers can reach your node, but you can run servers that

are accessible over any dialup IP connection whenever it's dialed up.

It's true that some access providers handle low-end dialup IP

connections through a rotary of IP addresses, and that's not

conducive to running servers, since it's difficult for users to know

how to reach them. But given a dedicated IP address, how long you

stay dialed up is a matter of degree more than of quality. A IP

connection that's up the great majority of the time is often called a

dedicated connection regardless of whether it's established by

dialing a modem or starting software over a hardwired link.

It's possible to run UUCP over a dedicated IP connection, but it's

still UUCP, and still does not support interactive services.

Some people object to excluding the asynchronous networks from a

definition of the Internet just because they don't support the

interactive services. The argument they make is that FTP, Gopher,

and WWW can be accessed through mail. This is true, but it's hardly

the same, and hardly interactive in the same sense as using FTP,

Gopher, or WWW over an IP connection. It's rather like saying a

mail-order catalog is the same as going to the store and buying an

item on the spot. Besides, we've yet to see anyone log in remotely

by mail.

Is IP Characteristic?

We further choose to define the Internet as being those networks that

use IP to permit users to use both the communication services and at

least TELNET and FTP among the interactive services we have listed.

This requirement for IP has been questioned by some on the basis that

there are now application gateways for other protocol suites such as

Novell Netware that permit use of such services. This kind of

application gateway is actually nothing new, and is not yet

widespread. We choose to think of such networks, at least for the

moment, as yet another layer of the onion, outside the core and

consumer layers of the Internet.

Others have objected to the use of IP as a defining characteristic of

the Internet because they think it's too technical. Actually, we

find far fewer people confused about whether a software package or

network supports IP than about whether it's part of the Internet or

not.

Some people point out that services like WWW, Gopher, FTP, TELNET,

etc. could easily be implemented on top of other protocol suites.

This is true, and has been done. However, people seem to forget to

ask why these services developed on top of IP in the first place.

There seems to be something about IP and the Internet that is

especially conducive to the development of new protocols. We make no

apologies about naming IP, because we think it is important.

There is also the question of IP to where? If you have a UNIX shell

login account on a computer run by an Internet access provider, and

that system has IP access to the rest of the Internet, then you are

an Internet user. However, you will not be able to use the full

graphical capabilities of protocols such as WWW, because the

provider's system cannot display on a bitmapped screen for you. For

that, you need IP to your own computer with a bitmapped screen.

These are two different degrees of Internet connectivity that are

important to both end users and marketers. Some people refer to them

as text-only interactive access and graphical interactive access.

Some people have gone so far as to say you have to have graphical

capabilities to have a full service Internet connection. That may or

may not be so, but in the interests of keeping the major categories

to a minimum, we are simply going to note these degrees and say no

more about them in this article. However, we agree that the

distinction of graphical access is becoming more important with the

spread of WWW and Mosaic.

Conferencing Systems and Commercial Mail Systems

Conferencing systems such as Prodigy and CompuServe that support mail

and often something like news, plus database and services. But most

of them do not support the characteristic interactive services that

we have listed. The few that do (Delphi and AOL), we simply count as

part of the Internet. The others, we count as part of the Matrix,

since they all exchange mail.

We find that users of conferencing systems have no particular

difficulty in distinguishing between the conferencing system they use

and the Internet. CompuServe users, for example, refer to "Internet

mail", which is correct, since the only off-system mail CompuServe

supports is to the Internet, but they do not in general refer to

CompuServe as part of the Internet.

Similarly, users of the various commercial electronic mail networks,

such as MCI Mail and Sprint-Mail, seem to have no difficulty in

distinguishing between the mail network they use and the Internet.

Since they all seem to have their own addressing syntax, this is

hardly surprising. We count these commercial mail networks as part

of the Matrix, but not part of the Internet. Many of them have IP

links to the Internet, but they don't let their users use them,

instead limiting the services they carry to just mail.

Russian Dolls

So let's think of a series of nested Chinese boxes or Russian dolls;

the kind where inside Boris Yeltsin is Mikhail Gorbachov, inside

Gorbachov is Brezhnev, then Kruschev, Stalin, Lenin, and maybe even

Tsar Nicholas II. Let's not talk about that many concentric layers,

though, rather just three: the Matrix on the outside, the consumer

Internet inside, and the core Internet inside that.

the core the consumer the Matrix

Internet Internet

interactive supplier- consumer- by mail

services capable capable

stores and shoppers mail

shoppers order

asynchronous yes yes yes services

Some people have argued that these categories are bad because they

are not mutually exclusive. Well, we observe that in real life

networks have differing degrees of services, and the ones of most

interest share the least common denominator of electronic mail. Thus

concentric categories are needed to describe the real world. You

can, however, extract three mutually-exclusive categories by

referring to the core Internet, the interactive consumer-only part of

the Internet, and to asynchronous systems.

Other people have argued that these categories are not sequential.

They look sequential to us, since if you start with the core Internet

and move out, you subtract services, and if you start at the outside

of the Matrix and move in, you add services.

Outside the Matrix

In addition to computers and networks that fit these classifications,

there are also LANs, mainframes, and BBSes that don't exchange any

services with other networks or computers; not even mail. These

systems are outside the Matrix. For example, many companies have an

AppleTalk LAN in marketing, a Novell NetWare LAN in management, and a

mainframe in accounting that aren't connected to talk to anything

else. In addition, there are a few large networks such as France's

Teletel (commonly known as Minitel) that support very large user

populations but don't communicate with anything else. These are all

currently outside all our Chinese boxes of the core Internet, the

consumer Internet, and the Matrix.

DNS and Mail Addresses

There are other interesting network services that make a difference

to end users. For example, DNS (Domain Name System) domain names

such as tic.com and domain addresses such tic@tic.com can be set up

for systems outside the Internet. We used tic.com when we only had a

UUCP connection, and few of our correspondents noticed any difference

when we added an IP connection (except our mail was faster). This

would be more or less a box enclosing the consumer Internet and

within the Matrix. But the other three boxes are arguably the most

important.

Some people have claimed that anything that uses DNS addresses is

part of the Internet. We note that DNS addresses can be used with

the UUCP network, which supports no interactive services, and we

reject such an equation.

It is interesting to note that over the years various attempts have

been made to equate the Internet with something else. Until the

mid-1980s lots of people tried to say the Internet was the ARPANET.

In the late 1980s many tried to say the Internet was NSFNET. In the

early 1990s many tried to say the Internet was USENET. Now many are

trying to say the Internet is anything that can exchange mail. We

say the Internet is the Internet, not the same as anything else.

Summary

So, here we have a simple set of categories for several of the

categories of network access people talk about most these days. Any

such categories are at least somewhat a matter of opinion, and other

people will propose other categories and other names. We like these

categories, because they fit our eXPerience of what real users

actually perceive.

You'll notice we've avoided use of the Words "connected" and

"reachable" because they mean different things to different people at

different times. For either of them to be meaningful, you have to

say which services you are talking about. To us, reachable usually

means pingable with ICMP ECHO, which is another way to define the

core Internet. To others, reachable might mean you can send mail

there, which is another way to define the Matrix.

Once we have terms for networks of interest, we can talk about how

big those networks are. We think the terms we have defined here

refer to groups of computers that people want to use, and that some

people want to measure. Many marketers want to know about users.

Well, users of mail are in the Matrix, and users of interactive

services such as WWW and FTP are in the Internet. Other people are

more interested in suppliers or distributors of information.

Suppliers of information by mail can be anywhere in the Matrix, but

suppliers of information by WWW or FTP are in the core Internet. It

is easy to define more and finer degrees of distinctions of

capabilities and connectivity, but these three major categories

handle the most important cases.

We invite our readers to tell us what distinctions they find

important about the various networks and their services.

Security Considerations

Security issues are not discussed in this memo.

Authors' Addresses

John S. Quarterman

Smoot Carl-Mitchell

EMail: tic@tic.com

 
 
 
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