My grandfather was a very wise man.
When I was a little kid, my grandfather told me something that had stuck with me all these years. He wanted me to do well in school. He wanted me to study hard, get good grades, and learn about as much as I can. His favorite saying was "Knowledge is Power". That was the key. If you know things, you can do things with that knowledge.
The Internet is full of knowledge. Knowledge is information. Information is what goes through the Internet. Information about money transfers between banks. Information about inventory shipments from suppliers. Information about medical advances. Information about consumers shopping on the net. Information is everywhere on the Internet. All that data, all those little ones and zeros, zapping around the Net. It's all information of one sort or other.
Everyone thinks that the Internet is sort of a free thing that anyone can connect to, and information is there for anyone. Take Napster, for instance. (Remember them before they were forced out of business?) In this case, the information was music files. You could get just about any music file you wanted, from any artist, from any record company. And you could share your music files from a CD that you bought with anyone else. People were using Napster to make their own music CD's. You download the music files you want, and then burn a CD with your selection of music, not the selection that the record company put on a CD. And there were other devices that you could load with music/MP3 files that could play back the MP3 files.
So a lot of people were sharing music (MP3) files. Napster was one place to get the MP3 files you wanted. You bought the CD, you can do whatever you want with the music. You bought it, you owned it, you can share it if you wanted to. It's all just 'information' on the Net: it belongs to everyone.
But the record companies weren't too thrilled about that. So they shut Napster down with an expensive and aggressive legal attack. It's copyrighted material, they said. "We own the copyright, we own the distribution. You can't give a copy of our copyrighted material to anyone or everyone."
I'm not going to get into that philosophical discussion; who owns the music, or who owns the information. But it shows that information is the basis of the Internet. If you can control that information, you have power. Internet information is knowledge. Knowledge is power. My grandfather knew that.
Someone was trying to control the knowledge/information on the Net.
Sitting on my front porch, I now knew the 'how'. The viral delay packets were controlling the information. I was working on the 'where' - where the control was coming from. I knew the 'why' - why the information was controlled ('Knowledge is Power')
Now I needed to find out the 'who' - who is behind all of this? And the 'when'.
And I was most worried about the 'what if?'. What if it got out of control? That would be a Problem. As you and I already know.