Democracy of internet was never intended

This may come as a surprise - the Internet is 40 years old this autumn. Doesn't seem that long, does it?

Well of course it depends on what you call ‘Internet’. It's really more the anniversary of the grandmother of the Net we know.

In 1969, all that existed was an experiment to prove that decentralised, distributed communication could work. Sounds complex, but it could hardly be more simple. Conventional communications are hierarchical.

Think of the 1916 Rising. (An unexpected example, but bear with me. . .) I'm not sure if it was part of the plan, but because the GPO was the nerve-centre of the postal system, its occupation by the volunteers stopped virtually everything except local mail throughout the country.

The military lesson was obvious – a centralised communication system is terribly vulnerable. Local mail is harder to stop. So, can a nationwide system be at the same time entirely local? Surprisingly, yes. If you connect every sub-post office to its nearest neighbours, and those to their neighbours and so on.

A message is not sent into the centre to be routed back out again, but passed from one local office to another 'across country' until it reaches its destination. The brilliant part is that this still functions even if you occupy or blow up the majority of the offices; your letter just has to take a longer route. But the Internet as we know it took shape gradually over the '70s and '80s, as they allowed first universities and eventually the general public to play.

Thanks to e-mail and chat rooms – and thanks particularly to cheap local call rates – it quickly took off in America. But it was from Europe that the next big change was to come. In the '80s, Europe was experimenting with online public information systems.

France had the Minitel for sending data over phone lines, Britain was doing it using broadcast TV. But these ideas were still essentially hierarchical.

All that changed at the start of the '90s when the World Wide Web first appeared. The Web took advantage of the distributed nature of the Internet – and took it further.

Any modern personal computer can read websites; what fewer people realise is that it can also be a website. You can host your own site on your home computer and open it to the public. And as every page on the Web can link to any other, it is the most distributed, non-hierarchical form of communication ever invented. (Though to reward the inventor, the British promoted him to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which I can't help think was missing the point.)

The ball was back in America's court then, where a university in Illinois made the breakthrough which created the Web we know today: Pictures! Sound, animation and full video quickly followed, and soon we had an all-singing, all-dancing Web that now becomes hard to distinguish from television or the general media avalanche.

And though this is great, it is also perhaps a shame – because it makes it easy to forget that the Internet is the first truly two-way form of mass communication, accessible to around a quarter of all people on Earth, yet owned by nobody except the people who use it. It's the world's biggest exercise in democracy.

And that was never part of the plan. [email protected]