Viruses, Security Issues Undermine Internet

Technological solutions for many of those problems have existed for years, but it's been difficult to build a consensus to implement them. Arguments about global politics, potential profits and ownership of intellectual property have plagued groups trying to fix things.

"The problem with the Internet is that anything you do with it now is worth a lot of money. It's not just about science anymore. It's about who gets to reap the rewards to bringing safe technologies to people," said Daniel C. Lynch, 63, who as an engineer at the Stanford Research Institute and at the University of Southern California in the 1970s helped develop the Internet's framework.

As the number of users exploded to more than 429 million in 2000 from 45 million in 1995, Lynch remembered watching in horror as hackers defaced popular Web sites and shady marketers began to bombard people's e-mail inboxes with so much spam that real messages couldn't get through.

When the Internet's founding fathers were designing the network in the 1960s and 1970s, they thought a lot about how the network would survive attacks from the outside -- threats like tornados, hurricanes, even nuclear war. What they didn't spend much time thinking about was internal sabotage. Only several hundred people had access to the first version of the Internet and most knew each other well. "We were all pals," Lynch said. "So we just built it without security. And the darn thing got out of the barn."

Years passed before the Internet's founders realized what they had created.

"All this was an experiment. We were trying to figure out whether this technology would work. We weren't anticipating this would become the telecommunications network of the 21st century," said Vinton G. Cerf, 62, who with fellow scientist Robert T. Kahn, 66, helped draft the blueprints for the network while it was still a Defense Department research project.

Even as he marveled at the wonders of instant messaging, Napster and other revolutionary tools that would not have been possible without the Internet, Leonard Kleinrock, 71, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who is credited with sending the first message -- "lo," for "log on" -- from one computer to another in 1969, began to see the Internet's dark side. "Right now the Internet is running amok and we are in a very difficult period," Kleinrock said.

Some technologists have said the Internet or parts of it are so far gone that it should be rebuilt from scratch, and over the past decade there have been several attempts to do so. But most now agree that the network has become too big and unruly for a complete overhaul.

For now groups are working on what are essentially bandages for the network.

Today, a complicated bureaucracy of groups known by their abbreviations help govern the network: the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force, which comes up with the technical standards), ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the naming system for Web sites) and the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium, which develops technologies for the Web). But their power is limited and their legal standing murky. Some have recently argued that the United Nations should take over some regulatory functions. Firms have set up their own standards groups to suit their own interests.

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that security must be the priority when it comes to the next generation Internet. Major companies are promoting technology that will give recipients of e-mail "return addresses," or a better way of ensuring that senders are who they say they are, though the companies disagree on whose technology should be used. A group of scientists from the Internet Engineering Task Force, perhaps the most important standards-making body for the network, are working on a way to better collect and share information on computer intrusions.

Internet2, a consortium of mostly academic institutions that has built a screaming-fast network separate from the public Internet, is testing a technology that allows users to identify themselves as belonging to some sort of group. Douglas E. Van Houweling, president of Internet2 and a professor at the University of Michigan, thinks the system could be used to limit access without using passwords to, say, chat rooms for women with children on a certain soccer team, or to subscribers of certain magazines or newspapers.