What if the Web never happened
esr.ibiblio.org
esr.ibiblio.org
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]."
I think, like the steam engine, inter-networking was a technology who's time had come.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
I remember a few graphical BBS systems that also had some of the conceptual underpinnings of the web today in terms of graphical interfaces.
But I agree, We would have probably ended up with something pretty much like we have today.
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.
P.S. I am a closet libertarian.
I don't think there's anything especially revolutionary in what I just stated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My 2c.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3335#comment-310551 June 18th, 2011 at 8:01 pm
esr Says:
>Sounds like you like government after all.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/tag/bring-laws-and-gods/
The historical point of departure is that Archimedes of Syracuse was captured, not killed, and brought back to Rome.
I linked you to a blog category page; there's no "brochureware" as yet.
The pretense being maintained was that only direct affiliates of government-sponsored, authorized research programs were being allowed on
and
One such serendipity was the invention of the World Wide Web
But that's contradictory - Tim Berners-Lee was a full member of an official research project when he invented the WWW!
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 think this might be a prelude to an attack on Facebook.