History

The history of the Internet began in the United States in the late 1960's. Originally named ARPANET, the Internet was primarily used to share computing resources between university campuses. These campuses were at the time already independent computing sites and the purpose of the ARPANET was to connect these sites using an architecture where all hosts were equals. With the terminology used today this network arrangement, where all hosts are considered to be equals, is called peer-to-peer [Ora01].

In the early days the Internet was much more open than it is today. Security was not a big concern and connections could be made directly to any host connected to the Internet. The increasing security concerns has, besides better protection, led to difficulties for efficient use of certain services. For more details see section sec:problems.