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Jimmy Kimmel and Charlie Kirk - What Trump et al do not understand about the Internet. [1]
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Date: 2025-09-18
We will get to Kimmel and Kirk. But first some history so we know how we got here.
I go back more than a bit in the Internet. We visited Bletchley Park during a trip to the UK in 2022. Once it was the most secret place in England, given that their job was to crack enemy crypto during WW2. Now it is a really neat museum. The key ideas that gave us Computer Science started here. Their key mission was to listen to enemy radio Morse code and to decrypt those messages. In other words, wireless digital communications protected by encryption for privacy — what your wireless router does for your laptop/tablet while you read this. One of the professors (emeritus) at UCSC where I got my C.S. degree was Harry Husky, an assistant to Alan Turing there. Many of the key ideas in computing, databases, and communications started in these buildings.
I got my start in 1973 when I talked one of my instructors, John Warnock, later of Adobe fame, into giving me a summer intern job at NASA Ames on the ILLIAC IV project. My task was to test and debug the first ARPANET interface designed for the Digital PDP-11 minicomputer. After graduation I worked on ARPANET and then Internet projects for many years. I was not a key player but I did work for some of key researchers, writing and testing bits of protocol code that are still used today in every phone/laptop/tablet you own. So I have been around this stuff for a while.
The ARPANet was a key change in digital communications. Its underlying technical idea is “packet switching” where a network of computers (nodes in the network) would send information to and through each other in discrete “packets” of data that could be re-assembled at the destination. The older model was “circuit switching” where the telephone network would connect one to the destination over a dedicated circuit controlled by a centralized switching center. Packet switching solved two problems. First, it could be more efficient since end-to-end wire circuits didn’t get locked down for the whole conversation. Second, since these “packets” could take any route to the destination, if a connection between “nodes” broke, got dug up by a back-hoe (don’t ask me how I know...), traffic could automatically get routed another way. DoD liked the idea of having reliable comms even when a bit in the middle got blown up by the bad guys. It is also why your 5G phone seamlessly works while you are on walk about, sometimes using the 5G network, sometimes using the Wifi in your house or a coffee shop.
The Internet is the direct descendant of the original ARPANET. The Internet solved two problems that arose from using the ARPANET. First, there could only be 255 computers on the ARPANET which didn’t seem to be an issue at design time (1968) given that all the computers at that time filled rooms (like the ILLIAC IV). That assumption started to break down when I was testing that first PDP-11 interface. Now computers were a single rack size and you could easily have more than four in a typical computer center, four being the maximum number of “ports” on an ARPANET Interface Message Processor (IMP), the node I mentioned above of which you also could only have 63. If you follow the ARPANET link above to the Wikipedia page you will see a map of the network in 1977. On the left side, middle you will see ”Stanford” which already had three “host” computers including a PDP-11 with a production version of the interface I debugged at Ames. Just to the right of that is the SUMEX node which I and a hardware engineer from BBN, the company that managed the net, installed over a weekend in 1975. The Internet protocols solved that problem by expanding the addressing from 8 to 32 bits or 28 (256) to 232 (4,294,967,296) addresses. The second idea was to move from a single network as ARPANET was to any number of “interconnected” networks, hence the name “inter-net”. You could have a network using these protocols and I could have one too. All we needed to do was make sure that each of us used addresses that did not “conflict”, i.e. all of the addresses in both networks had to be unique. We could then connect a “router” between the two and any device on my network could talk to any one on yours. Rinse and repeat. That is what the little box in your house from your Internet provider or the “Hot spot” on your phone does. It connects your network with your TV and tablet to your provider (Ziply, Comcast, AT&T) which also connects to the rest of the world via their routers.
Side Note: At one of the Internet engineering meetings I attended in 1980 or so the major topic was focusing our research work on refining our efforts it into protocol standards. Once we declared something standard, it could only change through a detailed consensus process so it was important to get things right the first time. We were discussing how big to make the standard (IPv4) address. The guys from Xerox PARC were arguing for 48 bits (248 or 281,474,976,710,656) which still lives on as the unique address for your Ethernet/WIFI/Bluetooth device. The 32 bit advocates argued that the computers we had at that time would have significant memory use/expansion problems. Whatever we chose, we would be stuck with it for a long time. “Besides, 32 bits is 4.2 billion addresses. We’ll never run out...”, one person said. One early Internet “influencer” declared around 2000 that the Internet was a failure because we didn’t think ahead... We ran out in April of 2010 while I was working at Yahoo! Luckily, the community saw this coming before that and expanded the addressing, a massive effort, to 128 bits (2128 or 3.4028236692094E+38), a 39 digit number in the IPv6 standard. This should hold us for a while, at least until the Klingons want to connect. Some failure. We never dreamed it would go this far. Hey, we got some things right.
We have gone through this history lesson for a reason. Decisions we made decades ago affect what is going on today. We knew early on that if the Internet idea as the base of communications technology were to spread, managing the whole thing across multiple organizations (remember we were only talking about DoD, technology companies, and academic research institutions like the ones I worked at at the time) a centralized management like what “Ma Bell” had would quickly fall apart long before we got to 4.3 billion connected devices. Even DoD understood that the only level of cooperation they could expect to get between the Army and the Navy was at the base protocol level — and that would be before they even mentioned the idea to the Air Force (don’t ask me how I know about that either...) All that means is that the organization of the Internet was designed to be de-centralized from the very beginning — on purpose. I have explained this countless times over the years (now decades) in presentations and conversations both professional and over beers. Business people in the U.S. simply do not understand, “get it”. They think in org chart hierarchies and cannot imagine anything working well without a CEO type at the top barking orders.
What can I say.
This is where we come to Jimmy Kimmel, Charlie Kirk, and Trump’s MAGAverse. There was a time when there were three major networks, CBS, ABC, and NBC. There was also only one telephone company, AT&T with GTE on the side as a “competitive” fig leaf. It was a small, select group of wealthy American White guys who ran everything. Thirty years ago if a media CEO didn’t like what you said, you were “off the air” never to be seen again. And they routinely did that. No wonder everything looked nice with no rough edges in the all-White casts, uniform everything centered on suburban bliss. See Mad Men. But those days are gone. Long gone. Broadcast TV and radio are being eplaced by YouTube and its multiple streaming equivalents serving a wildly diverse population all around the world. Question: How much time do you spend with your TV vs your laptop? ‘Nuff said.
People are worried that, now that the blatant influence peddling and the outright in-the-sunlight bribery at the White House and FCC is consolidating everything from Amazon, Meta, and Google to the “major networks” into the hands of Trump’s billionaire friends, all is lost. Not so. They have bit off more than they can chew. They are still thinking small while bragging how big they are. Small minds rarely do big things. They have also kicked the bear in the process.
Remember the de-centralization — on purpose? There is only one organization that is at the center of the Internet, something that most people have never heard of. It is called the IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. It’s job is simple. Remember the agreement you and I would have to work out so our addresses would not conflict/overlap? IANA does that for the whole planet. The Internet address assigned to your 5G phone or the router in your home is part of a “block” of addresses that your Internet provider or mobile phone company got from the IANA. IANA also manages the top level of the Domain Name System (DNS) that gives you the address (a number) for Google when you enter “google.com” into your browser. Note that I say top level. All that their “root servers” know and send you is where to find “com”. There is a separate, unaffiliated organization that gives you the “google” part. Note that the DNS for Bletchley Park is “www.bletchleypark.org.uk”. The only part of this, the “root” part that IANA controls is where to find “uk”, a server in a separate organization in the UK. The same applies to “org”, yet another organization in the UK. Bletchley Park, through their name provider, owns both “bletchleypark” and its associated “www”. IANA manages a few other things as well but that is it. They just administrate the database of numbers and names that everyone else agrees to and uses. Nothing else. Nobody runs the Internet. We cooperate — for survival.
So how does this help us as the Trump regime attempts to shut down 1st Amendment rights? Go ask Putin. The Russians have tried to lock down their Internet to keep their failures in his “Special Miliitary Operation” hidden from the Russian people. Sure, they cut the links to block the outside news feeds but then the ATMs in the country no longer worked. People couldn’t use their credit/debit cards. Government services stopped working. Banks couldn’t move money around. China tries the same thing. But as we designed the net, we made possible things like Virtual Private Networks (VPN) that use the base network to create another (encrypted) one on top of another network making the whole network between end points look like a single link. Companies use VPNs to connect offices and remote users everywhere. Private persons both nice and dastardly do the same. The Russian and Chinese governments use VPNs to securely connect things — until they break things while severing links to try to lock down everybody else and hide things.
The same applies here.
The Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive, was developed in San Francisco in 2001 as the Internet, really the “web” started moving front and center for the general public. The founders started it because they noticed that web content was disappearing as various web sites got re-organized or disappeared. As the Trump regime has scrubbed government websites of key documents, the Internet Archive preserves a copy. As you can see from the linked Wikipedia article, the Internet Archive has been involved in litigation from content creators and some governments trying to control what is visible on the net but those efforts have been mostly futile. The Internet Archive has also distributed/moved the archive offshore to prevent seizure and shut down by hostile governments. There is another lesson in these efforts at control by content authors and others. There is a price you pay if you try to monopolize and hide stuff. It may vanish and if the Internet Archive does not have it anymore it is gone — and you will vanish as well. Control is only temporary and the unintended consequences of the attempt are most often painful if not fatal. And remember, the Wayback Machine is not the only archiver. Once something is out there assume it will never go away.
Kimmel and Colbert may be “off the air” in broadcast media (and the network websites probably) but they are not gone by a long shot. Sure, YouTube is owned by Google who could block access but given the Twitter → X mess, people are starting to understand and are moving to other, safer sites. Google is faced with the same problem. If Google or Facebook try censorship, the same will happen to them as people are going elsewhere. Colbert and friends can easily set up their own streaming service, or if necessary go off-shore out of Trump’s reach, and keep on moving while CBS, ABC, and (soon) NBC struggle to fill those time slots and stay relevant. Remember, in this case, the opposite of “on the air” is not “off the air”. It is “dead air” what any broadcaster fears most. Colbert et al bring the ratings/revenue, the “click-throughs”, not Trump or the CEO of CBS.
Monopoly and dominance only works when you are the only game in town. We designed the Internet so that the “only” anyone has is an address and maybe a domain name, just like everybody else.
As for Charlie, his bile will probably still be on the Internet Archive long after “Turning Point” slides off into oblivion when their site goes dark for non-payment of service fees. Not that anyone would care at that point.
The Internet may even outlive the U.S. government that funded its development. Even if the Trump regime dismantles us into squabbling two-bit “shit hole” fiefdoms and destroys our technical leadership and economy, the rest of the world already has the code and can duplicate the IANA. The IANA has already moved once to become independent of the Dept of Commerce. It can easily do it again even by relocating to another continent. Remember it is the Internet. And what most of us are familiar with, the World Wide Web that is built on top of it was named that way for a reason.
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