NEW YORK — Few were paying attention back on Sept. 2, 1969, when about 20 people gathered in Len Kleinrock's lab at UCLA to watch as two bulky computers passed meaningless test data through a 15-foot gray cable.
That was the beginning of the fledgling Arpanet network and what would become the Internet. Stanford Research Institute joined a month later, and the University of Utah and UC Santa Barbara by year's end.
Goofy videos weren't on the minds of Kleinrock and his team at UCLA. Neither was social networking, for that matter, nor were most of the other easy-to-use applications that have drawn more than a billion people online.
Instead the researchers sought to create an open network for freely exchanging information, an openness that ultimately spurred the innovation that would later spawn the likes of YouTube, Facebook and the World Wide Web.
There's still plenty of room for innovation today, yet the openness fostering it may be eroding. While the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth.
A variety of factors are to blame. Spam and hacking attacks force network operators to erect security firewalls. Authoritarian regimes block access to many sites and services within their borders. And commercial considerations spur policies that can thwart rivals.
"There is more freedom for the typical Internet user to play, to communicate, to shop — more opportunities than ever before," said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "On the worrisome side, there are some longer-term trends that are making it much more possible (for information) to be controlled."
The Internet didn't become a household word until the '90s, after a British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the Web, a subset of the Internet that makes it easier to link resources across disparate locations.
That early obscurity helped the Internet blossom, free from regulatory and commercial constraints.
"For most of the Internet's history, no one had heard of it," Zittrain said. "That gave it time to prove itself functionally and to kind of take root."
Even the U.S. government, which funded much of the Internet's early development as a military project, largely left it alone, allowing its engineers to promote their ideal of an open network.
When Berners-Lee, working at a European physics lab, invented the Web in 1990, he could release it to the world without having to seek permission or contend with security firewalls.
Even the free flow of pornography led to innovations in Internet credit card payments, online video and other technologies used in the mainstream today.
"Allow … open access, and a thousand flowers bloom," said Kleinrock.
That idealism is eroding.
An ongoing dispute between Google Inc. and Apple Inc. underscores one such barrier.
Like some other mobile devices that connect to the Internet, the iPhone restricts the software that can run on it. Apple recently blocked the Google Voice communications application, saying it overrides the iPhone's built-in interface.
On desktop computers, some Internet access providers have erected barriers to curb bandwidth-gobbling file-sharing services used by their subscribers.
Steve Crocker, an Internet pioneer who now heads the startup Shinkuro Inc., said his company has had a tough time building technology that helps people in different companies collaborate because of security firewalls.
No one's suggesting the removal of all barriers, of course. Security firewalls and spam filters became crucial as the Internet grew and attracted malicious behavior.
What the Internet's leading engineers are trying to avoid are barriers that are so burdensome that they squash emerging ideas before they can take hold.
Already, there is evidence of controls at workplaces and service providers slowing the uptake of file-sharing and collaboration tools. Video could be next if consumers shun higher-quality and longer clips for fear of incurring extra bandwidth fees. Likewise, startups may never get a chance to reach users if mobile gatekeepers won't allow them.
If such barriers keep innovations from the hands of consumers, we may never know what else we may be missing along the way.
e-mail: njesdanun@ap.org