> We could try to push the internet back toward its ethical roots. However, it would be a complex challenge requiring a joint effort by interested parties — which means pretty much everyone.
That "everyone" also includes bad actors.
That's a non-starter for building a system that can serve all people on the planet, so it's not the right approach. There is no way back; the only way is forward, informed by the past, but recognizing the weaknesses of its origins as well as its strengths.
weren't they all working for the .mil?
Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" is a satisfactory history of that era, up to the near-present, albeit with a clear political perspective.
There were plenty of us there who were accidental visitors, curious kids who found ourselves in this interesting world. Kleinrock mentions this briefly in the original article, but there was a high degree of trust and optimism on the early internet, and if one was technically inclined and a little outgoing and generally a good egg, it wasn't hard to get an account somewhere.
When I first logged into MIT-ITS around 1982, coming in over dialup as a teenager calling a modem bank near the Pentagon, the login-failed message said something like, "Sorry, that username does not exist. Would you like an account?" It was RMS himself who gifted me (and a lot of others) a free account for the asking.
It's a hard thing to explain to people who weren't there -- I think this is why so many people in this thread see Kleinrock as naive or worse. My girlfriend never believes me when I try to explain the early internet; it seems an impossibility to her, as if I was talking about some pre-historic hunter/gatherer culture.