October 2019

50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong?

When I was a young scientist working on the fledgling creation that came to be known as the internet, the ethos that defined the culture we were building was characterized by words such as ethical, open, trusted, free, shared. None of us knew where our research would lead, but these words and principles were our beacon. We did not anticipate that the dark side of the internet would emerge with such ferocity. Or that we would feel an urgent need to fix it. How did we get from there to here?

The first online message was sent 50 years ago. How has the internet evolved since then?

Fifty years ago, two letters were transmitted online, forever altering the way that knowledge, information and communication would be exchanged. On Oct. 29, 1969, Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at UCLA, and his graduate student Charley Kline wanted to send a transmission from UCLA's computer to another computer at Stanford Research Institute through ARPANET, the precursor to what we now know as the internet.  ARPANET connected universities working for the Department of Defense under its ARPA (now DARPA) program for new military technologies.