The Internet is often depicted in drawings as a cloud. That’s not terribly inaccurate; machines join and leave the network all the time, making it impossible to create a true real-time map of what the Internet really looks like. The concept has given rise to a number of related terms for software, services and storage using machines located elsewhere on the worldwide network, such as cloud computing and cloud storage.

But John Markoff wrote a piece for The New York Times about companies that are building around the Internet itself. They’re using a time-honored technique known as peering, in which organizations hook their networks directly to one another. Why would you do this instead of sending files over the ‘Net? Well, it’s pretty simple. You see, it’s all about speed.

Your connection to the Internet takes a different path each time each time you send or receive a file. Packets are sent from machine to machine until they get where they’re supposed to go. Peering cuts down the number of connections a file has to make before it can reach its destination. More traffic is traveling on what Markoff is calling “dark networks” — they’re not accessible to the general public.

This can be a good thing. Why? Because it’s taking high volumes of Internet traffic off of the main backbone of the Internet. It may relieve stress, but some fear it may make the Internet more vulnerable to attack, because the redundancy of millions of computers is lessened somewhat. On the Internet, if one machine is compromised, packets are re-routed to other machines and the traffic goes elsewhere. The rise in dark networks means some of those machines are on the edge of the network now, providing a network to which only a few  have access.

For his article, Markoff talked to Northeastern University’s Director for its Center of Network Science, Albert-László Barabási, the first to attempt a map of the Internet. The changes going on now aren’t causing any serious deficiencies in the Internet, Dr. Barabási said. Then again, he said, it’s not helping it, either. Others, such as AT&T mathematician Walter Willinger, Naval Post Graduate School research scientist David Alderson and California Institute of Technology electrical engineer John C. Doyle, feel that the diversity of networking techniques is strengthening the Internet.

It’s hard to imagine how you’d map the Internet. In fact, the men Markoff talked to are using different models of thinking to describe the way the systems are working together. Either way, I’d guess it’ll be a learning experience that will propel advanced networking in the future.