The Internet Stack
An accessible journey through the seam that connects the digital world of the Internet to our physical world.
The stack—the conduit between our digital and physical worlds—is the elusive, mysterious, and least-understood part of the Internet. In the five seconds it took you to read that, 100 quadrillion bits of data just whizzed through the stack. Our metaphors—cloud, virtual, cyber—blind us to the incredible reality: The Internet is a physical thing: dingy, wet, and rusty. In The Stack, Amrit Tiwana takes us on a journey through this gritty reality.
The book begins with its breathtaking physical layer, laden with geography, luck, and history dating to the Civil War era. Then it shows us how most Internet traffic flows deep undersea as laser…