How Big is the Internet of Things and How Big Will it Get?

New information technologies have transformed world politics, and not always for the better. Even trying to understand how technology connects us reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the Internet. To understand what the Internet is becoming, let’s start with some basic questions—how big is it and how big will it be? In his two-part series for Brookings Institute's blog, Director of CMDS, Phil Howard examines what the Internet is becoming, how big the Internet of Things is and what the future may hold for us.  

New information technologies have transformed world politics, and not always for the better. Even trying to understand how technology connects us reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the Internet. To understand what the Internet is becoming, let’s start with some basic questions—how big is it and how big will it be?

In 2012, a creative programmer decided that it might be an interesting exercise to count all the devices that were connected to the Internet. Completing an Internet census was an intellectual and engineering challenge. Critically the census must be completed without interfering with them or slowing down the Internet. So the census taker built a “bot” and created a “botnet.”

The word “botnet” comes from combining “robot” with “network” and is a collection of programs that communicate across multiple devices to perform some task. The tasks can be simple and annoying, like generating spam or aggressive and malicious, like choking off Internet exchange points, promoting political messages, or launching denial-of-service attacks. Some of these programs simply amuse their creators; others support criminal enterprises. In playing around, the census taker discovered a surprising number of unprotected devices connected to the global Internet. A complete census was only possible with a botnet that would enlist all the unprotected devices in the service of the census project. The botnet would both count devices and replicate itself so that its copies could help count devices. The botnet spread out and found 1.3 billion addresses in use by devices around the world.

The script was called the Carna Bot after the Roman goddess of health and vitality. The exercise was about taking basic measurements of the health of the Internet. It worked brilliantly, reporting on many different kinds of devices, from webcams and consumer routers to printers and security systems. The researcher decided to remain anonymous but the findings were published as a public service. The census exposed two dark secrets about how the Internet works.

Read the first part of the article here and the second part here.