"The Minitel is a Videotex online service accessible through the telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. It was launched in France in 1982 by the PTT (Poste, Téléphone et Télécommunications; divided since 1991 between France Télécom and La Poste). From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to that now made possible by the Internet.
In February 2009, France Telecom indicates the Minitel network still has 10 million monthly connections, among which 1 million on the 3611 (directory). France Telecom is mulling an end of the service in September 2011[1]."
There was also Prestel and Teletext in England. Time, Inc. invested a ton of money here in a teletext startup. I don't know why they abandoned it but "who owned the VBI" (vertical blanking interval, which would carry teletext) was an issue back then too. AT&T also had NAPLPS in the works. Times Mirror and at least one other company I can't recall (in Florida) had NAPLPS systems up and going. Time Warner had Qube on cable in Ohio (Columbus?). None of them had the life or vibrancy or innovation of the BBS subculture.
As someone who played with both HyperCard and too many a BBS back in the day I can tell you that the web was inevitable (see FidoNet). It might have evolved in half a dozen ways and looked slightly different, but it would have happened. Also having somewhat survived the dot.com era of the 90s I'd have to say what really gave the web its power was broadband getting to the masses, and several industries gave that push.
I was going to say that Gopher would have probably morphed and evolved into something not too dissimilar to the web we have today -- it had the hyperlink idea down.
Fidonet was my first thought as well. I remember with some nostalgia sending emails to England from Australia back in the Fidonet days. It took a day or so to be delivered, but it did get there. The only restriction on Fidonet was the cost of international phone calls.
I think, like the steam engine, inter-networking was a technology who's time had come.
It's amusing to see a die-hard libertarian like ESR describe a dystopia where online services are being developed by private entrepreneurs rather than the US Government.
I think some libertarians support small governments and small corporations.
Large corporations always use their influence on governments. This happens for a lot of time around the world. Those corporations influence governments to stipulate laws that protect their own interests rather than interest of proletariat.
The most disturbing aspect is that those large corporations propaganda as they are in fact protecting proletariat's property right. In a country such as U.S. where 1% in populations control 33% of the wealth and 10% in population control 66% of the wealth, the law is not for protecting 90% population's property right, but the 10%.
You doubts this? Look at RIAA, MPAA's effort in U.S. Congress.
The problem isn't so much governments or corporations per se, but unaccountable concentrations of wealth and power.
The more concentrated that wealth and power becomes, and the more unaccountable the possessors of it become, the more open to abuse it becomes, without significant consequence to the abusers.
Most libertarians might be against such an unchecked concentration of wealth and power in the form of governments; some few might also object to it in the form of corporations; but which of them are against its concentration in the hands of private individuals?
Yet private individuals can abuse their wealth and power just as easily as can governments or corporations. As long as that wealth and power is not concentrated in the hands of too few individuals, it could be argued that they'd compete with one another and provide a check on one another's power.
But, to my knowledge, nothing in the libertarian ideology would preclude or oppose any individual or small group of individuals hoarding the overwhelming majority of wealth and power for themselves. In fact, such concentration of wealth and power would likely be a direct result of the implementation of libertarianism.
This is why laissez-faire economic aspects of libertarianism must be opposed.
Most libertarians always oppose power over others: "No one may initiate the use of force against another" does not make exceptions for individuals. In fact, they oppose government specifically because it claims the right to use force against its victims/citizens.
I don't think you've addressed the grandparent's point. Money is power over others; it is a claim on future production.
If you don't think money causes people to do things, or that increasingly large amounts of money cause increasingly large pressures on people to do things, I don't think you're being honest. Worming out along the routes of every transaction being free and mutually beneficial is balderdash; tell that to the starving man in the street when you wave some bread under his nose, that he's free to choose.
The right to intellectual property isn't a natural right like the right to physical property. The Constitution states that intellectual property (i.e. copyrights and patents) exist to serve the purpose of encouraging innovation. The RIAA, MPAA and software patent trolls' abuse of these rules serves to hinder innovation, and therefore these rules should be revised.
I don't think there's anything especially revolutionary in what I just stated.
Nothing really is a natural right. Nature is not a lawmaker. All rights, rules, and laws are simply what we define them to be. The laws of physics are about the only absolute laws out there. Watch out for people using the word "natural". Whenever they mention this word, they use it to mean whatever suits them best. It's from the 101 guide to critical reading: the use of the word "natural" is a huge red flag for someone trying to sell you their politics.
It may seem natural that it is hard to make copies of physical objects, but just wait 10-40 years (depending on who you ask) until 3D printers become commonplace, and then reevaluate what you consider to be natural.
I'm not a huge fan of corporations like Disney; however, I have a feeling that we are not using the proper ammunition when we attack them based on what our idea of "natural" rights is. As a programmer, I feel that following logical rules should not be encumbered by patents. As an artist, I get pissed when someone tries to imitate me without proper credit, and I feel fully justified in using legal means to stop them. I guess this means that I believe (so far) that abstract algorithms should not be patentable while software implementations (which carry not just algorithms but also a cultural component) as applied to specific problems should be. I know some people try to make them both patentable -- I am against that.
>I guess this means that I believe (so far) that abstract algorithms should not be patentable while software implementations (which carry not just algorithms but also a cultural component) as applied to specific problems should be.
How do you distinguish between the two? If you come up with a revolutionary new cryptography algorithm and implement it in C, you would only be able to patent that implementation. If I came along later and merely re-implemented your innovation in Python, I could free-ride off your innovation without paying you a cent. Is that right or fair? I don't honestly know. What I do know is that its dreadfully hard to separate concept from implementation in a field as abstract as programming.
Remember, I attribute the takeoff of the Internet to DARPA deliberately lying to its political masters. This happened precisely because DARPA’s leadership knew it was impossible within the incentives operating on governments for them to tolerate the ‘randoms’ or the results DARPA foresaw.
Why is that amusing? It's consistent with his beliefs.
It's hard to imagine what would happen if things hadn't happened the way they have. I expect we'd have cheaper deployment and it would be wireless somehow.
If the infrastructure is outsourced to taxpayers, there is no incentive to develop a better one.
Technology aside, I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the social implications of no web, even on a personal level. My husband, my boss, my two very closest friends, the nonprofit I volunteer with that means so much to me - those all started first as internet acquaintances that grew into real, offline relationships that span thousands of miles and have had a profound impact on my life and have shaped who I am - and I'm just one person.
Not sure if the author of this piece actually witnessed what the Internet was like without the WWW. Or, more specifically, without NCSA Mosaic, which really jumpstarted the WWW.
My experience back then was that the Internet did grow exponentially even when the WWW was not yet popular. Much faster than Compuserve and others.
Also, the allegation that Linux wouldn't have happened is bogus since development of Linux actually started way before 1993/94 (when NCSA Mosaic made the Web popular).
The Internet was alive and well before the web came along. It was certainly a different beast at the time but the author is spot-on when observing that the distributed, anarchic nature of ARPANET lies at its foundation.
There is also an alternate scenario that might be interesting to speculate about. Before wide-spread internet availability a lot of people were connecting to (mostly) privately run BBSes. Inter-BBS networks like FIDONET were developed for passing email between FIDONET nodes with gateways into other systems (including, IIRC the internet).
In a world without ARPNET based internet it's not hard to imagine commercial services being built around this. Given enough volume these services would start setting up dedicated links to each other. Enough services start doing this and it makes sense to set up exchange points. All these services rely on the same protocol to communicate over exchange points and that would make proprietary protocol changes difficult so a more-or-less open engineering consortium would be the next logical step to push such changes. Real time communication over this network would be a real commercial selling point (hello chat systems!) so next thing you know you have 'special' emails with high priority and some extra flags that don't end up in email boxes but are sent to end-user programs that only send and receive the 'special' emails. (Hey there protocol selection!).
This wouldn't get us the web any time soon (this kind of network wouldn't have room for arbitrary data floating around), but market forces + social momentum could conceivably build an alternative version of a global data communication network.
There was a movement by AT&T to block research and implementation of internet or have you forgotten. In fact they wanted the infrastructure done their way not decentralized, etc. Than there was FIdonet, etc.
The problem with counterfactual history is that history is nonlinear: The things which do happen affect the things that don't. In particular, it is very hard to write the future history of things that were squelched by larger forces before they could grow big. Squelched things are obscure. They are hard to research.
It's hard enough to write an actual early history of, say, Apple -- much of it was witnessed only by a handful of people, and memory is fallible, and lots of traditions have obscure beginnings -- but how do you write the future history of the company that Steve Jobs would have started if Woz had decided to remain at H-P? It's like trying to predict hurricanes by tracking all the butterflies.
Look, by being here you should understand one basic thing: What big companies do doesn't matter in terms of what society wants done. Successful companies ride the wave of society, not dictate. Dictators don't last. Any AT&T interference wouldn't have mattered. It's like saying IBM could have stopped personal computing.
>Or, more specifically, without NCSA Mosaic, which really jumpstarted the WWW.
It also harmed HTML too. For example, originally HTML was not based on SGML. But Dan Connolly decided it should be based on SGML in 1992. Sadly for them, Mosaic was released next year, which was also not fully compliant with SGML.
>>Technological change has a tendency to look inevitable in retrospect – “It steam-engines when it’s steam-engine time.”
You would think so. But basically all parts of the steam engine where invented in Roman times (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology). Unfortunately, the empire collapsed before anybody found the time to put the parts together. If they had, we would... well, something.
Even earlier than that actually - the Greeks had both the differential gear and the steam engine.
There is pretty much nothing technological that would have prevented Athens from destroying its opponents with steam powered tanks several centuries B.C.
Plus at the time the standard tactic would be a deep phalanx, which would have been absolutely smashed by a tank driving over it.
I happen to host the blog (among others) of an author who has written just such a novel: Bring Laws and Gods. It should be released some time this year.
Tim Wu argues persuasively in The Master Switch and elsewhere that these things come in cycles, and that we're well on our way out of the cycle that led to an open internet, and into a cycle of consolidation and control (see: Facebook, locked down cell phone networks, net neutrality, etc).
We have a pretty good idea of what would have happened without the us government developing the Internet: 1) compuserve, genie, aol, prodigy, et al. and 2) SMS messaging.
The scenario presented here seems to mistake the Web for the Internet.
Before the Web was invented, Usenet (and to a lesser extent, WAIS and Gopher) was a thriving protocol, with relatively large numbers of people participating daily. Usenet was my first introduction to the Internet, and for years, it was to me what Facebook is to many people now.
There were MUDs where we spent many late hours engaged with other Internet users around the world, and yes, our email systems were on the Internet.
Thousands of independent ISPs were thriving before the Web came along, most having gotten their start as dial-up BBSes. Each provided access to a wealth of Internet services.
For that matter, hyperlinking was already commonplace in Gopher, and fairly mature in Hypercard.
CD-ROMs were introducing rich multimedia experiences before the Web came along, and it doesn't take much of an imagination to move from CD-ROMs and Gopher to something very similar to the Web we know today.
It's fun to imagine alternate dystopian histories, but the one described here is far-fetched, to say the very least.
I don't understand how he got through this entire post without mentioning AIM, Facebook, Live.com, and Gmail, which are doing their damnedest to make his vision come true.
Maybe what we know as the internet is a woefully inadequate imitation of what it COULD HAVE been. If only some influential people at DARPA could have done a few things differently, then technological advancment would have happened an order of magnitude faster, and we would already be a space faring civilization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
"The Minitel is a Videotex online service accessible through the telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. It was launched in France in 1982 by the PTT (Poste, Téléphone et Télécommunications; divided since 1991 between France Télécom and La Poste). From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to that now made possible by the Internet. In February 2009, France Telecom indicates the Minitel network still has 10 million monthly connections, among which 1 million on the 3611 (directory). France Telecom is mulling an end of the service in September 2011[1]."