Crack teams of volunteers keep the net online and functioning, according to leading internet lawyer Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University.

哈佛大学首席互联网律师Jonathan Zittrain称，一组无名志愿者保证网络的在线和运转。

The same social structures that drive Wikipedia also keep the net healthy

The way data is divided up and sent around the internet in many jumps makes it "delicate（微妙的，纤细的） and vulnerable" to attacks or mistakes, he said.

However, he added, the "random¹ acts of kindness" of these unsung（未赞颂的） heroes quietly keep the net in working order.

Professor Zittrain's comments came at the TED² Global conference in Oxford³.

Incidents such as when the Pakistan government took YouTube offline in 2008 exposed the web's underlying⁴ fragility（脆弱，虚弱）, he explained.

But a team of volunteers - unpaid⁵, unauthorised and largely unknown to most people - rolled into action and restored the service within hours.

"It's like when the Bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call," Professor Zittrain told BBC News.

Blind faith

The fragility of the internet's architecture was largely due to its origins, said Professor Zittrain.

He said it had been conceived with "one great limitation and with one great freedom".

"Their limitation was that they didn't have any money," he told the TED audience in Oxford.

"But they had an amazing freedom, which was that they didn't have to make any money from it.

"The internet has no business plan - never did - no CEO, no single firm responsible for building it. Instead it's folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to or because they were expecting to make money from it," he said.

That ethos（民族精神，大气）, he suggested, had led to a network architecture that was completely unique.

"As late as 1992, IBM was known to say that you couldn't build a corporate⁷ network using internet protocol⁸（草案，协议）."

Internet protocol (IP), the method used to send data around the internet, was first described by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974. Data is broken into chunks⁹ - or packets - and sent around different parts of the network, often owned by different corporations and entities¹⁰.

Professor Zittrain likened it to how a drink may be passed along a row of people at a sporting（喜好运动的，冒险性的） event.

"Your neighbourly duty is to pass the beer along - at risk to your own trousers - to get it to its destination."

"That's precisely¹¹ how packets move around the internet, sometimes in a many as 25 or 30 hops¹² with the intervening entities（存在，实体） passing the data around having no contractual or legal obligation to the original sender or to the receiver."

The route the data takes depends on the net's addressing system, he said.

"It turns out there is no overall map of the internet. It is as if we are all sat together in a theatre but we can only see in the fog the people around us.

"So what do we do to figure out what is around us. We turn to the person on our right and tell them what we can see to the left and vice⁶ versa（反过来也一样）.

This method, he said, gives network operators a general sense of "what is where".

"This is a system that relies on kindness and trust, which also makes it very delicate and vulnerable," he said.

"In rare but striking instances, a lie told by a single entity¹³ within this honeycomb can lead to real trouble."