IRC Communication Research Resources

Mass Media Resources

Dreyfus, S.M. "How Internet Chat Shrinks the World."
The Age [Melbourne, Australia] 11 Feb. <http://www.theage.com.au>
Online Posting. 11 Feb. 1997.

Tuesday 11 February 1997

How Internet chat shrinks the world

By S.M. DREYFUS

COMPUTER programmer Matthew Green wasn't looking for love when he began spending hours using Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Like many other users of the Internet's live, multi-user chatting service, he was a student, with time on his hands, a desire to travel and not much money. He couldn't afford to tour Europe, the US and Canada in person, so he visited them electronically, via the IRC.

Thousands of hours on-line and millions of keystrokes later, he fell in love with an American student, Monica Weaver, in 1992. Two-and-a-half years after that, he flew to Illinios to meet her in person. In mid-1995, she moved to Australia and they were married.

Interestingly, Green played a pivotal role in developing the very network that allowed him to meet his spouse. Now working as a systems administrator with the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute in Melbourne, Green was maintaining and developing IRC II, the most widely used UNIX IRC client software.

He is one of two Australians who fundamentally shaped the worldwide IRC network. The second, Internet security analyst Darren Reed, of Cybersource Pty Ltd, maintains and develops IRCD, the software used by the hundreds of connected Unix servers that form the backbones of the IRC networks.

Reed also essentially set the standards for IRC communications, having co-authored the IRC technical standard, or RFC. An RFC, or Request for Comments, is basically how a technical standard is defined for an Internet protocol and is a mark of prestige in the coding world.

Both Green and Reed view IRC primarily as a playground - a fun way to spend leisure time and learn about other cultures. Green said: "It is a very time-efficient way of meeting people with similar interests." However, companies are increasingly using IRC in their intranets for work, not play.

Long-time IRC user Matthew Aldous, a systems administrator at the Mental Health Research Institute, said: "IRC is used as a cheap, fast, text-based alternative to collaborative discussion." He estimated that, outside intranet use, about 5 per cent of today's IRC traffic was work related, with another 10 per cent being related to education. The last 85 percent was still little more than friendly banter.

According to Reed, the number of non-concurrent IRC users has grown dramatically from 2000 worldwide in 1990 to what is believed to be at least half a million people today, excluding corporate intranets. American internet service providers (ISPs) estimated that about a third of their customers wanted IRC - and asked for it by name, he said.

The importance of this growth is evidenced by the big companies' increasing interest in IRC. Netscape is trialling a new IRC chat program (Netscape Chat 2.0 beta) and Microsoft is believed to be planning to swap from its own proprietary protocol in its chat program to the standard communications protocol used in most IRC client software.

Green believes that Australia has an unusually high number of IRC users and puts this down to the country's physical isolation. "The more remote people are, the more likely they are to use IRC," said Reed. As it has grown, the world's largest electronic playground has changed and fragmented. IRC was once a large, interconnected network with a few hundred "channels" dedicated to specific topics. You could join a channel, such as #cricket, #france, #linux, or #hottub, the original sex channel, to catch up with the same people virtually every day. You could develop a community of online friends.

In mid-1996, many users who had joined a channel regularly found the place empty. All their on-line friends, and perhaps even electronic lovers, had disappeared. The main, unified IRC network had been ripped apart.

The primary cause was a political bun fight between American and European server operators, according to Green, who spent a great deal of time on-line listening to the people trying to negotiate the network back together. He said the Americans expelled one of their own operators, for allegedly hacking his IRC server, behaving like a cowboy and causing general pandemonium on the network.

The cowboy's expulsion from the IRC network might have gone largely unnoticed except for one key fact: the network's main link between Europe and the US just happened to run through the cowboy's server. So, when the American operators cut him off, they also cut off all of Europe. Australia was caught in the cross fire.

While the European operators didn't condone the cowboy's behavior, they thought the expulsion was an over-reaction. There had always been differences in how the Americans and Europeans did things and the dispute highlighted those differences, but neither side was prepared for the backlash from the IRC users.

"I saw a lot of users get very angry at both sides because the friends they had been talking to just weren't there any more," Green said. "People joined the operators' channels and abused them. Thousands of people complained."

Several weeks of frantic e-mail and high-level negotiations, culminating in an on-line conference of more than 50 senior IRC operators and developers, failed to heal the rift. The schism became permanent. The two halves evolved into what are known today as Efnet and Irc Net. The third network, Undernet, began a few years before but was never a part of the main unified IRC network.

New small networks started springing up. There are now at least 45 different IRC networks, none of which talk to each other. Some are local networks, some are international.

According to Reed, commercialisation of the Internet in Australia also contributed to the growth of smaller local IRC networks and therefore the fragmentation of IRC worldwide.

"Australia was cut off from the larger IRC networks for a period because of volume charging and the ever-increasing levels of IRC traffic," Reed said.

He explained that most IRC servers in Australia were originally volunteer outfits, with people such as himself and Green donating their time and universities provided a computer link. But when the Internet was commercialised and Telstra began volume charging for international Internet traffic, the universities re-evaluated some Internet services.

A few local Australian IRC networks appeared in response, but without international links. The situation improved recently when Telstra began running its own IRC server, which provides access to international IRC channels. But finding a channel you can call home on-line - and keeping it - is more difficult. Green concedes that IRC is not stable. But there is greater choice now on IRC, with thousands of IRC channels. In theory, there is also less "lag" - delay in sending messages.

Matthew Aldous said the break-up of IRC was inevitable due to its rapid growth. The original, underlying communications protocol simply wasn't designed for so much traffic.

"The protocol started saturating. Maybe the split-up kept IRC alive," he said. "Now, if you tried to put all the IRC networks together again, it just wouldn't work. It would be like 50,000 drivers hitting the freeway at the same time - no one would go anywhere."

But while the network has been breaking up, its users continue to come together. Green has just attended yet another wedding, this time in Sydney, of an IRC couple.

That is the upside. The downside is that there are many people who have been deeply disappointed after meeting an IRC friend in person. Green warns people not to expect too much from IRC. "Just because I met my wife on IRC, doesn't mean you will," he said.

Like most forms of recreation, using IRC carries some other risks. Addiction is endemic among IRC users. According to Reed, those with plenty of spare time, such as students or people in undemanding jobs, often spend 40 hours a week on IRC. In fact, IRC is known at some universities as "I Repeat Classes".

Aldous warns people that nothing a user says on IRC should be considered private, even if it is sent in a private message. He said: "You have to remind yourself when you are on, chatting on IRC, that everything you say is just as private as if you stood on the steps of Flinders Street Station and shouted it at the top of your lungs."

As IRC has grown, so have the number of "undesirable" people who spend time on it. There have been stories of paedophiles convincing children to give out their addresses over IRC, of infatuated men and women endlessly harassing someone they met on IRC. One story has a woman in the US being murdered by a man she met on IRC.

Whether the stories are true or IRC folklore, the bottom line, according to Reed, is that users should never give out personal details over the IRC.

Meeting IRC people in person can be a dangerous proposition. Then again, living a little dangerously has its rewards - just ask Matthew and Monica Green.