Internet’s at Home Almost Everywhere

Does the Internet live in Virginia?

The answer, according to the Economic Development Authority of Fairfax County, Va., is yes. The agency touts Fairfax County as “Home of the Internet” on its Web site (https://www.fairfaxcountyeda.org) and in radio promotions on National Public Radio.

The claim is based partly on the fact that Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol--which became the language of the Internet--in the Fairfax County city of Reston, said Jerry Gordon, president of the EDA. In addition, the county is currently home to such Internet heavyweights as America Online, UUNet and PSINet.

“The estimate we got from the Internet Society--which is also here in Fairfax County--is that 50% of worldwide Internet traffic crosses through our borders every day.”

But Los Angeles also claims a key piece of Internet history. In 1969, computer scientists at UCLA installed the first node of the Arpanet, the precursor of today’s Internet. That fact has prompted Mayor Richard Riordan, among others, to call Los Angeles the “birthplace of the Internet.”

“For sure, UCLA is the home of the Internet,” said UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock, who helped create the packet-switching technology that makes the Internet work. The folks in Virginia who claim otherwise are “impostors,” he said.

Cerf, a onetime UCLA graduate student who is now senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology for MCI WorldCom in Reston, Va., disagrees with Kleinrock’s reasoning. Several cities--including Palo Alto, Cambridge and Arlington, Va.--also hosted instrumental developments in the evolution of the global computer network. Therefore, he said, the Internet has no single hometown.

“The Internet lives where anyone can access it,” Cerf said.