1. What is the Internet?

In the early 1970s Vince Cerf and Bob Kahn began working on the design of the internet. It was the result of another experiment called the ARPANET, which stood for Advance Research Project Agency Network, which was a U.S. Defense Department research project. Paul Baran was trying to build a communication system that might actually survive a nuclear attack. His idea was to break up messages into blocks and send them as fast as possible in every possible direction through a mesh network.

Who controls the internet? The honest answer is nobody and everybody. The internet in made up of an incredibly large number of distributed, independently operated, networks. There is no central control that is deciding how packets are routed or where pieces of the network are built.

Yet, there are forces at work that seem to be trying to control the internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.