Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I suppose everyone has forgotten about all the privately developed and deployed networks before the internet as we know it - BIX, Prodigy, MCImail, Fidonet, UUCP, Telenet, the BBS systems, etc. To presume that without the ARPAnet there would be no internet is a huge stretch.

View on HN

All the networks you listed are circuit switched, centralized networks; they really don't have anything to do with the Internet at all. The claim that without ARPAnet there would be no Internet is almost self evident, considering how fundamentally different the networks you listed are from the Internet. There's no way a commercial entity would have had the same design philosophy [1, Section 3] because a commercial entity has much different motivations.

As an aside, the best example that you could have given would have been Minitel (but still, centralized and circuit switched).

[1] http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark...

Most of those networks also evolved gateways to interconnect to each other. The history of technology is often one that starts out with proprietary interfaces that evolve under user pressure to standardized, open interfaces. We see that playing out yet again in the iPhone vs Android competition.

As soon as there were two computers, people tried to connect them. The more they got connected, the more universal people wanted those connections to be. If commercial companies wouldn't do it, non-commercial entities would (after all, look at linux and the enormous success of free software). Heck, even I worked on hooking computers together back in the 70's using ad-hoc parts and wires and (never having heard of arpanet at the time) even sketched out how a decentralized "web" might work.

The idea that a decentralized fault tolerant network is such a novel concept that it required a government to think of it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even the telephone system is decentralized. There are decentralized fault tolerant systems all around us as examples.

It doesn't require the government to think of it, it requires the government to implement it. It would be a massively stupid decision from a business point of view to implement the Internet as it exists today. There's much more money in centralized networks. I think this should be obvious from the fact that (1) at the time all commercial companies were building centralized networks and (2) today text messages cost upwards of $1k per megabyte. The only reason why the Internet is architected the way it is today is because of government funding. One the government set the Internet in motion towards a decentralized, packet switched network, it could not be overcome by commercial companies.

FidoNet is the counterexample that shows the government was not required to implement a global, decentralized, fault tolerant network.

Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols.

Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols.

Which phone network are you talking about? Certainly not any I'm familiar with.

I'm no evangelist for government-financed R&D, but I don't think you could possibly have picked a worse example (http://www.corp.att.com/history/history3.html) for your argument.

For another example, the telegraph and telephone networks in the US were built with private funding. Even the transatlantic cables were private ventures (at enormous cost).

I'm curious about all the downvotes with no comments. If the facts are wrong, say so.

Accept them and don't worry too much about karma.

I am aiming for 6502, but won't be sad if it takes a while...

You might read a bit about the history of the Bell System before lecturing us all about how the telephone network was built and paid for.

There's a lot more to it than AT&T's version. See http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-6.html

I don't see anything in AT&T's link suggesting it was paid for by the government.

A guaranteed monopoly lasting eighty years or so isn't a government subsidy?

It's not clear, and Cato's document doesn't explain, how anyone outside of major cities would have been able to get telephone service in the absence of monopoly guarantees. Universal service would have taken decades otherwise.

There is some hand-waving in the document comparing telephone service, which required expensive and widely distributed equipment, easements and infrastructure, with radio and TV (which itself was regulated out the wazoo). This comparison doesn't survive even momentary scrutiny.

The Bell System was the envy and standard of the world, and I don't see how it could have been anywhere near as successful at meeting the needs of the entire US population without those initial monopoly guarantees. Contrast the telephone system's universal service mandate with privately-operated electrical distribution networks: sizable chunks of New York City and Boston were still using DC power until the 1960s.

I think the biggest problem with the AT&T monopoly was that they were allowed to milk it for decades longer than was good for anyone, including the AT&T companies themselves. The company should have been broken up the minute they showed a net profit.

Even that opinion is debatable, though -- we didn't get the first laser from General Electric, or the first transistor from Hewlett Packard. Both these inventions and countless more came from a company that, by government fiat, could engage in long-term research beyond that needed to show an immediate profit.

So, yeah... that Cato position paper is pretty goofy, IMHO, and it's one of several that will be on my mind when it's time to re-up my own membership.

Just goes to show there is another side of the story besides the AT&T version.

I've never found a company yet that didn't believe that free market competition was good for everyone else, but that their market was unique and they should be protected from competitors.

The irony here is that at the time of the Kingsbury Commitment, phone networks were spreading across the country like wildfire. AT&T had already built its long distance network - it obviously didn't require a monopoly guarantee in order to do so.

From the article, there were 3,000 phone companies. Surely with that number plenty would do very well in places other than major cities where there weren't 2,999 competitors. Just as obviously, with so many competitors there were not high cost barriers to entry.

The irony here is that at the time of the Kingsbury Commitment, phone networks were spreading across the country like wildfire.

That's not good enough, though. The phone system was something that needed to be everywhere, including areas where poverty and/or population density could never have justified a business case.

Were those 3,000 phone companies all building compatible equipment? I don't know, but I'm guessing not. This would have been a problem when it came time to tie them into a single long distance network.

Perhaps some compromise could have been reached in which they would all agree to deploy compatible equipment... but is there really an economic advantage in having 3,000 regional monopolies all doing exactly the same thing, as opposed to one mega-monopoly? Either way the individual customer is going to have to deal with a monopoly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com